For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty. – Douglas Sirk
In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics – an almost frozen idea of what beauty is. – Douglas Sirk
So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less. – Douglas Sirk
At the same time, of course, Marxism arose – Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism – and art became political. – Douglas Sirk
Intellectualism came very late to America. That’s why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals. – Douglas Sirk
Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands. – Douglas Sirk
I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style. – Douglas Sirk
My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people – samples from every period in American life. – Douglas Sirk
And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained – and still remains – only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world. – Douglas Sirk
I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart. – Douglas Sirk
Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films. – Douglas Sirk
But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them. – Douglas Sirk
The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy. – Douglas Sirk
There arose a belief in style – and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art. – Douglas Sirk
Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture. During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant. He never interfered. – Douglas Sirk
I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. – Douglas Sirk
If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason. – Douglas Sirk
These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition. – Douglas Sirk