Quotes About Cinema

There is more to Indian cinema than just Bollywood. I think regional cinema, especially Tamil and Marathi cinema are exploring some really bold themes.

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.

As the acting class was going on, I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I love movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.

I spent 15 years of my career trying to convince people that Indian cinema is relevant. I am so proud of Indian cinema and I am so proud of my Indian roots. The IIFAs are doing a great job to this effect.

To evoke the classic period of Italian cinema in a little film seemed like a great, fun thing to do. I had relations to that period. I had known Fellini and I had known Antonioni. I had made a movie with Antonioni and I had visited Fellini in his studios. So, it seemed like something worthwhile doing. You bring yourself to that mythical cinema.

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

I 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.

I believe there's only good cinema and bad cinema.

I have a very simple mantra and it's this: I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music. That's my big goal. The larger preoccupation is how do we force cinema to respond to the existential, political, and spiritual dimensions of who we are as a people.

I 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.

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.

Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can't believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I'm interested in.

It is my first preference to do films with social significance. Art cinema has given me credibility and status as an actor, but commercial cinema has given me a comfortable living.

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.

I'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.

When I grew up, you'd see shorts before movies. I know it happened a lot more before I started going to the cinema.

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

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

The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.

If a chemical drug like Viagra is accepted by society and by the world to ignite desire, then what is the problem with my audio-visual drug called cinema which ignites desire? Both are basically doing the same thing!

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.

The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.

Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite.

I think that the dramas that you find in TV are actually a lot more interesting, typically, than what you find in cinema.

Sitting in the darkness of the cinema, I got to see another world. This imaginary world was a refuge for many of us. Of course, the films were controlled and censored by the regime. But I still thought, around this time, that maybe making films would be good for me. I thought of expressing myself through this medium, and of doing something for the Kurds. The options were clear: either I'd work as a lawyer under the Baath regime or make movies independently.

For me cinema is image, sound, and the faces and bodies and, yes, voices, of my actors, and sometimes the words that they are saying, but not only the words.

To the documentary director the appearance of things and people is only superficial. It is the meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person that occupy his attention... Documentary approach to cinema differs from that of story-film not in its disregard for craftsman-ship, but in the purpose to which that craftsmanship is put. Documentary is a trade just as carpentry or pot-making. The pot-maker makes pots, and the documentarian documentaries.

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.

Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day.

I know Camberwell very well: I used to go to Camberwell New Baths a lot and the cinema, which used to be the Odeon. My old school is around there too, though you've got to understand that I went to a lot of schools.

If I'm in theatre, cinema doesn't even cross my mind. Similarly when I'm making a film, theatre doesn't cross my mind.

Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world.

We've kind of grown up in a post-Star Wars era, and what Star Wars did to cinema, in terms of an explosion of that kind of blockbuster culture. It's thrown up a generation of geeks. With the evolution of computer games and the Internet, that's all impacted on us as a generation, and affected the creative element of that generation enormously. So whereas the different schools of filmmaking...

If you're not making epic, archetypal films on some level, I think you're wasting a great potential of cinema.

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

It may be that we exist and cease to exist in alternations, like the minute dots in some forms of toned printing or the succession of pictures on a cinema film. It may be that reality is an illusion of movement in an eternal, static, multidimensional universe. We may be only a story written on the ground of the inconceivable; the pattern on a rug beneath the feet of the incomprehensible.

A journalist in America told us that we'd [with Johhny Depp] been working together for 10 decades, so we're a lot older than we look! We actually knew each other before the invention of cinema, so we have quite a good, long relationship.

Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.

There are cinéphiles and cinéphages. Truffaut is a cinéphile. A cinéphage - a film nerd - sits in the front row and writes down the credits. But if you ask him whether it's good, he'll say something sharp. But that's not the point of movies: to love cinema is to love life, to really look at this window on the universe. It's incompatible with note-taking!

I think my dyslexia was a vital part of my development because my inability to read and write meant that I had to find knowledge elsewhere so I looked to the cinema.

The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.

Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies - what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?

For me, the most important word in cinema is the word freedom. For example, in Europe, we've got freedom, we've got the final cut and that's something which is marvellous.

French cinema allows women to look... a certain way and be talented at the same time.

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

I am very grateful that the Russian budget has a yearly budget for film. And usually this budget goes to "auteur" cinema, which actually needs this support and which indeed contributes to creating "national culture".