Quotes About Cinema

In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.

Cinema doesn't connect with the body as artists have in two thousand years of painting, using the nude as the central figure which the ideas seem to circulate around. I think it is important to somehow push or stretch or emphasize, in as many ways as I can, the sheer bulk, shape, heaviness, the juices, the actual structure of the body. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

I like action movies, even though I think action movies are kind of derided now. But there is something extraordinary about action movies, which is absolutely linked to the invention of cinema and what cinema is and why we love it.

I don't believe in proper cinema; it doesn't have the strength of television. People having to go out to the cinema is really archaic. I'd much rather sit at home.

War is cinema, and cinema is war

Cinema d'auteur, cinema about people, about emotions. About la difficulté d'être, the difficulty of being, existential problems. That's what the nouvelle vague is. The early '60s was all about that.

I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?'

My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.

If you're going to break cinema, film, and movies apart, very rarely to you get the opportunity to even think that you've been a part of cinema.

I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic.

At times doc filmmaking feels more rewarding creatively. Because you are creating something out of pure cinema - instead of narrative cinema, where you've got a script and a cast and you build from your foundation, whereas in documentary, you're building out of chaos.

The great thing about cinema is that it's a great binder. It brings people from across the world together, often erasing the lines between geographies, languages, familiarity, and the like. Cinema is art and art, they say, is a reflection of life and society, so the way we tell our stories is the main differentiator for me.

Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second.

Cinema is dead, long live cinema.

Here was opportunity to make an audience walk and move, be sociable in a way never dreamed of by the rigors of cinema-watching, in circumstances where many different perspectives could be brought to bear on a series of phenomena associated with the topics under consideration. Yet all the time it was a subjective creation under the auspices of light and sound, dealing with a large slice of cinema's vocabulary.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, "I learned so much today," that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It's only 100 years old.

What bothers me is that the cinema - what Fox News calls the "wholesome cinema that our children are supposed to be able to see" - is so violent. I'm not even talking about the content. I'm talking about the way in which it's cut.

I want viewers want to talk about The Conquest. I want the dialogue to start after the movie. The cinema is there to leave a trace. I hope my film leaves a trace and that it will open a door for French cinema and that tomorrow other directors will make political movies. The job of a filmmaker today is to talk about the world surrounding him and, through his movies, to both entertain and raise questions about modern society.

I seldom feel comfortable in a theatre. I always feel like I own a cinema. I feel equally happy in an empty one as a full one. Probably happier in an empty one!

I became a director just for the love of movies, because of the power of cinema.

I prefer working in good cinema, wherever it is. I like subjects that have a universal appeal.

I'm still fighting. I don't know how much longer, but I'm still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.

Cinema has reached a dead end.

The test for me, when I read other people's scripts, is whether I feel like there's something about me that is the best person to tell this story. I have a pretty high bar for myself. There's a lot of scripts that I read and think, "Oh, this is great, but I think there are 50 other directors who could bring this to the cinema."

As soon as I get my car I think I'll be going to the cinema more. Since I don't go very often, there are no films that are a must see at the moment. I usually wait till they come out on DVD.

Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.

I'm a professional and I'll do anything - a poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act.

The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.

Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.

As a matter of fact, I find the Western cinema very fantastic.

All my life, I have loved and been inspired by French cinema, and as a studio head it has been my pride and joy to have the ability to bring movies to audiences around the world.

I am grateful to theatre for making me what I am today. But it's not like theatre is my first love. I am equally attached to cinema, which is, actually, a child of theatre, since it borrows heavily from it.

Hollwood creates useful entertainment. There are millions of people on earth who need distraction and American cinema fulfills that function.

My documentaries have always been very much constructed in the spirit of dominant cinema. From the time I started making non-fiction, I was mainly interested in designing and creating documentaries like fiction, so it was a natural evolution to try and embark on doing a dramatic narrative.

Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

There's nothing better than having a collaborator that you have a great shorthand with and a great comfort with who's shepherding the project along. I mean, that's the best thing that can happen in cinema where there's many cooks in the kitchen.

I loved cinema from a very young age. I was also obsessed with Hitchcock and actresses like Kim Novak in Vertigo. They all played heroines and were strong, powerful women, yet they were very feminine.

I think most people, no matter their status now, have big screen TVs, because they're the standard TVs now. And so why would you go to the cinema?

That love is a conflict seems to me obvious and natural. There isn't a single worthwhile work in world literature based on love that is only about the conquest of happiness, the effort to arrive at what we call love. It's the struggle that has always interested those who produce works of art - literature, cinema or poetry.

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

I think the problem with the cinema currently is that so much of the money that goes movies that offer a certain kind of repetition.

Stepping into the "shoes" of someone's life other than my own, great movies such as 'Cinema Paradiso,' scenic landscapes, the work of Daniel Day-Lewis, the books of Joel Goldsmith, traveling, doughnuts, ice cream.

The cinema is there to heighten the imagination; I have always tried to make sure it does so.

I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman, What he has left is a legacy greater than any other director.... I think the extraordinary thing that Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value.

The so-called "remake" is simply a commercial formulation of a much deeper exchange which accounts for the way cinema is what it is.