'We can sustain the belief that a good film is necessarily an expression of one man’s vision, a communication from the director to his audience, only if we can demonstrate a difference in kind and effect between the personal film and the factory movie. The ‘stamp of one predominating creative mind’ must be visibly distinct from the stamp of several collaborating creative minds. Provided that a film has its own unity, it seems unimportant whether the unity was evolved through cooperation and compromise within the production team or conceived by one man and imposed on collaborators.
If the relationships established in a film are significant, it makes no difference to the spectator how they came, or were brought about, or to what extent their significance was intended. A movie has a meaning for the spectator when he is able to interpret its pattern of actions and images. Provided that its relationships are coherently shaped, the film embodies - and can be shown to embody - a consistent meaning which may or may not have been sought, or sincerely felt, by the director.'
V. F. Perkins, 'Direction and Authorship', in Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader edited by Barry Keith Grant, publisher: Blackwell Publishing