I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

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.

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.

I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.

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.

Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.