Quotes About Cinema

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

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?

I'm inspired heavily by film influences - David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Pedro Almodóvar, and what I see in the cinema - so there is a linking, an interweaving between memory, cinema and contemporary life, which the women in my pictures encapsulate.

The movies that I do are in love with cinema, and I try to show that I am in love with cinema. I want them to be, in other ways, drinking from other sources.

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.

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

I'm not hoping to see that day but I know that my cinema will reach Filipinos. I know that they will embrace it one day. It will happen. I'm very sure of that. I still have faith in cinema. I still believe it can affect change.

Restoration is to some extent part of the digital age. These days, if you re-issue a movie in theaters or on Blu-ray, it has to be in high-quality condition: You have to restore. We plan a Paris cinema theater dedicated totally to classics. If we think there's an audience, we will release classics in theaters. People will discover that it's worth going to the cinema to see great movies of the past in perfect condition. I believe a lot in that.

Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work. Just yesterday I saw a good film, but even if I'd seen a bad one, I'd feel, "Oh my god, what a bad job, I can do better."

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

I love cinema. It is the most important thing to me. Life is cinema. It has been this way since I was a child of about 14, and I was going every day to see the movies.

Never seek financial independence in independent cinema since independent cinema doesn't make money.

My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody.

Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.

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.

I'm a huge fan of world cinema, because each country uses cinema in a very individual way.

I 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.

It's just odd that something as essential in life as sex has been flattened out in mainstream cinema - and in art cinema. Even in art movies, sex always seems to be treated negatively. Why does it always end in disaster?

As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things - we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.

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

The beauty of life are women, no one loves them as much as me. I adore them all, the ugly, the beautiful, the cold, the sexy and especially those that are from cinema material, shadow and light.

The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.

The idea that boxing lends itself to cinema so well is because it's usually a morality play - good against evil, insecurity and triumph, fear strikes out, so the audience can really get drawn into the drama of it. Also, it was sensual and very primal. I think subliminaly we do two things - life is a fight, life is a struggle and we understand that from our early, early, early ancestors, and life is a race.

We've got the prettiest girls in the world here in Los Angeles and there's a great music scene. And I learned what I learned about cinema here in Los Angeles so it's always been really important to me as a city to live in and I love making movies about it.

There is no border in my films. You can see yourself in these stories. This is the greatest thing about the power of cinema. It's very present. It's all there. You can't escape it.

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

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!

Just telling a story. That's cinema. It's not silent, black and white. It's a simple story that's well made.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

I tell my children to avoid theatre and go into cinema and TV.

You can lose in cinema too if you don't put on a good performance.

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 one-word cinema wasn't possible for me anymore. I'd hit a wall, a dead end. Therefore I thought I'd turn back.

Cinema 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.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

I think that in the realm of commercial, popcorn cinema, the amount of message or smuggling of ideas you can get in there is quite limited. Like, if you think you're going to make a difference or change anything, you're on pretty dangerous thin ice.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.

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

Palestine is an extremely familiar place to me. Someone like me who lives everywhere in the world cannot be contained. If my hope and ambitions are in the right place, you can judge that in my films. I want to make films that diffuse any local notion. Cinema criss-crosses borders and check points. If the film is good, then it's universal.

There are no rebels in the cinema business.

I like action films, not exclusively, but I like Samurai films. I like Westerns. Not so much war pictures, but a few. I like kinetic cinema.

In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!

All the people I've met, many outside of cinema, knew everything perfectly about one thing or one subject or one area.

There are some films that arrive here from the international festival circuit almost incandescent with self-importance. They hover into the cinema in a kind of floating trance at how challenging and moving they are. They are films with a profound reluctance to get over themselves. They look up at the sceptical observer with the saucer-eyed saintliness of a baby seal in culling season, or a charity mugger smilingly wishing a nice day on the retreating back of a passer-by. One such is Babel.

I remember driving around with my parents when I was little and looking out of the window and being very aware that it was the shape of a film screen when you went to the cinema. This was how I first saw the world, framed through a car window.

I was raised in a family where cinema was a way of life. It was not only about making films, it was relationship, passion, love, everything at the same time.

In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.

You become a film critic because you're interested in film. I don't know whether knowing so much about cinema leads you to make better films, but it certainly can't hurt.