Popular quotes about Cinema! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 15
When I was a young man, my friends and I and all of us in New York were very influenced by French cinema. French cinema played an enormous influence on those of us who wanted to be filmmakers.
Woody AllenI first came to cinema as a passionate filmgoer, when I was a child. Then, when I was a very young man, I became a film critic precisely because of my knowledge of cinema. I did better than others because of this. Then I moved on to screenwriting. I wrote a film with Sergio Leone, 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' And then I moved to directing.
Dario ArgentoThere is no border. I'm branding my films as Malay cinema, but it's just about cinema. Everything that I make is about humanity's struggle, so there is no border, really.
Lav DiazRoger Ebert was a very valiant soldier of cinema who passed away, and we miss him. It's over with serious discourse about cinema in the print media and on television. It has been replaced by celebrity news. So we are speaking in his spirit always.
Werner HerzogI hate political films that have one particular message that they're trying to convey. I think propaganda is very dangerous, and it's very easy for anything to slip into it. I also think that propaganda is something that defies the identity of cinema. I hate propaganda in cinema, even if it was promoting the political stance that I myself am allied with. I always say that the responsibility of a film is first and foremost: To be a film. It's not a manifesto, it's not an op-ed.
Tamer El SaidI'm not able to completely escape naturalism. It's very difficult to escape from naturalism without being too dry. That's what I try to do in my cinema - escape naturalism and do films that are, at the same time, realistic but have a lot of fantasy. It's very difficult in cinema to get away from what life is about, from real life. The way the actors work has to be realistic - you can't do Baroque acting - so it's very complicated. And, we're human beings, so we're not perfect. I'm trying to do something different.
Philippe GarrelYou get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.
David LynchWell, you cannot think of cinema now, and you cannot think of cinema in the UK and not place Chaplin in the most extraordinary elevated context, if there can be such a thing, in that he was a genius, he was unique.
Richard AttenboroughI don't know what to say to people. It's become so big. It's become part of the cultural environment. For the first and second Twiglight, I knew exactly what to say to people. If you don't know what the story is by now, then you've probably never been to the cinema before. How about, "Why not go to the cinema for once?" I don't know.
Robert PattinsonI'm working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words, with material from my own life. I walk through life with my camera, and occasionally I film. I never think about scripts, never think about films, making films.
Jonas MekasSince I come from documentary background and my father is a documentary filmmaker, for me the core essence of cinema is it's social statement. It is somewhat similar to the work of a journalist, just on a different level. This is the kind of cinema I enjoy.
Ivan TverdovskyPolitics is different than movies. Politics are controlled by leaders. Leaders of every country have different interests. And they try to explain to their people why they should take one side or the other side. But in the movie its doing the opposite. It allows you to have a Universal Experience. You don't watch it as politics but as a movie. You don't have different reactions all over. It's so universal a language. It's not a political language serving a political agenda. The language of cinema is a world language. With the Hollywood movie, it brings about the same reaction wherever it goes.
Hany Abu-AssadI prefer working in good cinema, wherever it is. I like subjects that have a universal appeal.
Om PuriCinema is haute couture or, if that's a little too ambitious, at least it should approach that standard. Pathe Plus is just part of the business. We have to improve all our cinemas. In France, we're not looking to open many more screens, but rather to raise the standards of our current cinemas.
Jerome SeydouxI am sure that the two main forms of English, American English and British English, separated geographically from the beginning and severed politically since 1776, are continuing to move apart, and that existing elements of linguistic dissimilarity between them will intensify as time goes on, notwithstanding the power of the cinema, TV, Time Magazine, and other two-way gluing and fuelling devices.
Robert BurchfieldAs 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.
Tom FeltonI met Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage the second day after I arrived, you know. I had never seen or heard of Brakhage. For me, it was a revolution, because I was well educated in film, but American-style experimental film was known to me in the abstract, and I had seen practically nothing. I had seen a film then that Noรซl Burch had found and was distributing called Echoes of Silence. It was a beautiful film, three hours long. It goes forever and it was in black and white, very grainy, and I saw that film and I thought...it was not New Wave. It was really a new concept of cinema.
Babette MangolteThe saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.
Jean RenoirI think if some people know anything about African cinema it's something like the The Gods Must Be Crazy, which is such an awful, condescending movie that debases African participation, and anything I can do to shift that and draw attention to rich and widely varied films that come from there- because there's all kinds of filmmakers from Senegal, you have Mambety, and Haroun with Grigris.
Elvis MitchellI'm so happy and relieved for the indie spirited film world because ... I don't even know if it's indie, it's just alternative cinema that's just different than what the studios are doing and it's a big variety in that category. Everyone always is complaining about the film industry but I think it's important to acknowledge when it's actually a pretty good time when that comes back around. I'd be remiss not to say, "Hey, it's a pretty good era right now for these reasons," and maybe that doesn't last or maybe it does, but I will acknowledge it.
Richard LinklaterSometimes I have better relationships with my barber then with people who are into cinema from an upper class.
Gaspar NoeI'm curious and you know, I really think cinema is strong medium that allows you to go to so many different mental countries, not just geographical countries. As far as it allows me to express something of my own truth, it's fine for me. I can go to the moon.
Isabelle HuppertCinema informed my painting by the sheer geography - on locations, there is so much downtime. And when you're spending all this time creating art by committee, the concept of the singular voice is a pleasant antidote.
Billy ZaneThe 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.
Andre BazinI was lucky to start working when German cinema was having an interesting moment. Now the quality is going downhill again because they're insisting on doing comedies. We should know by now that we make good cars but we're not the funniest people.
Daniel BruhlI 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.
Om PuriThe essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.
Francis Ford CoppolaI think that cinema is a great place to make stories of loneliness. And being Norwegian, I don't want to make the film about loneliness in being out in nature on a mountaintop; it's about being in the cities.
Joachim TrierI do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.
Peter GreenawayI could almost say it is my religion. I guess that sounds pretentious, but I want to live and breathe cinema.
Giovanni RibisiAn art form requires genius. People of genius are always troublemakers, meaning they start from scratch, demolish accepted norms and rebuild a new world. The problem with cinema today is the dearth of troublemakers. Thereโs not a rabble-rouser in sight. There was still one, but he went beyond troublemaker to court jester. He clobbered the status quo. Thatโs Godard. Weโre fresh out of โbad students.โ Youโll find students masquerading as bad ones, but you wonโt find the real article, because a genuine bad student upends everything.
Henri LangloisWhy would anything change that has not been changed since the existence of cinema? [James] Baldwin somehow wakes you up to reality. It takes you out of the dream - or out of the nightmare.
Raoul PeckA book is a book, but a movie is a movie. The more faithful you are, the more you'll come up with Harry Potter #1 and #2, which are like filmed books on tape. They're so petrified of turning off the readers that they make no concessions to the fact that they're trying to make a piece of cinema.
Alexander PayneThere was a period of cinema, in the mid-90's, that I was a huge fan of, with Heat and Seven, and the Tarantino era. If I've ever been fanatical, it was about those films.
Rockne S. O'BannonI think the problem with the cinema currently is that so much of the money that goes movies that offer a certain kind of repetition.
Walter HillI came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema veritรฉ, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in.
George LucasFilm is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.
Werner HerzogWhat works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.
Yann MartelCinema is the greatest mirror of humanity's struggle. You see this alternative world, but you're part of it. Everybody is part of it. This is our world.
Lav DiazCinema is entertainment, and people go to the movies because they want to feel good and forget about everything.
Vincent CasselDigital has really achieved a certain image quality for capture. There's also the way we view and exhibit films. It really touches all aspects of cinema.
Christopher KenneallyThe Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema.
Derek JarmanSometimes I go to the cinema and I see a movie where the directors or the filmmakers are telling me what to think, what to feel. They are giving me all the answers, and I'm like, "What am I doing here?" I try to have an active audience that are thinking and feeling for themselves.
Pablo LarrainHaving a movie that lasts and makes your image imprinted into the history of cinema, it's very positive.
Ludivine SagnierI love acting with very little dialogue. As long as it's supported. I mean, in terms of cinema, you can have a great monologue, but if you're not supported by the images ... You can be feeling things and then you see it back, and you're like, "None of that came across." Or the angle of my face gives it a completely different interpretation than what I was trying to communicate.
Nicole Kidman