Thought:

“If he is conscientious, his preliminary work consists precisely of moving backward from the effect to the cause. Starting from this end result — the viewer’s emotional response — he looks for the combinations that will be most effective in its creation. It’s a path taken in reverse, a step-by-step retreat, full of choices, puzzles, redactions, interpolations, that arrives inevitably at the origins of the composition: that is, at composition itself.”

Robert Bresson