Quotes & Sayings About Ozu

I can make fried tofu, boiled tofu, stuffed tofu. Cutlets and other fancy stuff, that's for other directors. — Yasujiro Ozu

One of my favorite films is 'Late Spring' by Yasujiro Ozu. To me, it represents film as art. — Michael Arndt

I just want to make a tray of good tofu. If people want something else, they should go to the restaurants and shops. — Yasujiro Ozu

The wide screen reminds me of a roll of toilet paper. — Yasujiro Ozu

If the purpose of the stumpy little NFT theatre under Waterloo Bridge is not to acquaint young audiences with Ozu, with Ophuels, with D. W. Griffith and with Agnes Varda, then what exactly does it exist for? — David Hare

In a sense, 'Schmidt' is the most Omaha of my films. But have I gotten it right? I'm not sure. Did Fellini get Rome right? Did Ozu get Tokyo right? — Alexander Payne

People like me and Ozu get films made by hard work, but Shimizu is a genius ... — Kenji Mizoguchi

But then foreign critics right away made sweeping comparisons to haiku, noh theater, and directors like Ozu, as if the movie were somehow representative of Japan - which was, well, not what I was after. Similarly, with After Life, I deliberately set out to make a movie that was unlike what I imagined the foreign conception of Japan to be, and I figured non-Japanese wouldn't find it interesting at all. — Hirokazu Koreeda

Flora had not seemed to mind the excessive amount of time their parents demanded from them, which had meant that he could spend more time in his room working on his model houses and less time downstairs in the den, fidgeting through one of his father's interminable Ozu film festivals. — Hanya Yanagihara

In the neighborhood around Waseda, there were all these movie theaters, so every morning I left the house and watched movies instead of going to class. The experience of encountering films then is one of my greatest memories. Before that I'd never paid any attention to directors, but there I was taking a crash course in Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, Truffaut, Renoir, Fellini. Because I've always been naturally a more introspective person, I was more interested in becoming a screenwriter than a director. — Hirokazu Koreeda

In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy. — Roger Ebert