How do you like your stills?

The completion of Ivan's childhood marked the end of one cycle of my life, and of a process that I saw as a kind of self-determination.
It was made up of study at the Institute Of Cinematography, work on a short film for my diploma, and then eight months' work on my first feature film.
I could now assess the experience of Ivan's Childhood, accept the need to work out clearly, albeit temporarily, my own position in the aesthetics of cinema, and set myself problems which might be solved in the course of making my next film: in all of this I saw a pledge of my advance onto new ground. The work could all have been done in my head. But there is a certain danger in not having to reach final conclusions: it's all too easy to be satisfied with glimmers of intuition, rather than sound, coherent reasoning.
The wish to avoid expending in such a way made it easier for me to take up pencil and paper.

-- Andrey Tarkovsky: Sculpting in Time : Reflections on the Cinema