John Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He received 15 Oscar nominations and directed both his father and daughter to Oscar wins in different films. Huston worked as an amateur boxer, reporter, short-story writer and a World War 2 documentary filmmaker. Huston worked as a fine art painter early on in his career before becoming a film director. His visual style from his paintings helped his film career as Huston did very little post-production and preferred to shoot his films all at once which helped to save lots of money for the film studios. He wrote the screenplays for most of the films that he directed and most of these films have become Hollywood classics including such films as ‘The Maltese Falcon’, ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, ‘Moulin Rouge’, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ and ‘Moby Dick’.
Toward the end of his career; he also began to act in various films. He was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his role in the film ‘The Cardinal’. Many of Huston’s films involved themes that discussed the human condition and how human beings react to being put in impossible situations. Many of his films involved heroic quests or love stories that didn’t have a Hollywood happy ending but instead ended with the actors being unsatisfied in the outcome. Other film critics thought that Huston preferred to write and direct about the underdog as being the protagonist in his films. By his own admission, Huston cared little for what made film audiences satisfied. In this month’s quote, Huston discusses the difficulty in figuring out what makes people like or dislike films…
| “I Don’t Try to Guess What a Million People Will Like. It’s Hard Enough to Know What I Like.” – John Huston |
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