Quotes About Cinema

I think cinema is needed throughout Africa, because we are lagging behind in the knowledge of our own history. I think we need to create a culture that is our own. I think that images are very fascinating and very important to that end. But right now, cinema is only in the hands of film-makers because most of our leaders are afraid of cinema.

And having those mystical elements you see in Asian cinema and certainly Asian martial arts cinema, it's something that we wanted to begin to introduce - the idea of spirituality and the idea of there being something else out in the world besides people who are great fighters.

The cinema that I make is a cinema about people, emotion, humanity and passion. It's not just about what they struggle through, but what they live for. That's what I love. The music they love, the people they love, the clothing, the hair and the life that they love

Roger 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 It has been replaced by celebrity news.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.

I decided to go to the cinema school because I thought it was a new sort of media. Nowadays, it's not anymore, but in the '50s, cinema had a half century of age. Today it's more than one century. I thought it was a new media, a new way of telling stories.

I'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.

I don't believe that one has to tear down the cinema screen in order to renew cinema. But new input and new energy are lacking. They are flowing above all into the television technologies. We must, therefore, concentrate on the CD-ROM.

Let us start with the title of War and Cinema. The important part of the title is not War and Cinema.

I think American cinema, particularly, has become so disposable. It's not even cinema, It's just moviemaking.

Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.

National film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word "industry" is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.

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.

I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.

Cinema has reached a dead end.

I'm an idol of cinema? Oh, wow.

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

I've always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind.

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!

Look, I wasn't saying the Beatles are better than God or Jesus. I said 'Beatles' because it's easy for me to talk about Beatles. I could have said TV or the cinema, motor cars or anything popular and I would have gotten away with it.

We're trying to tell stories. We're a company that's concerned with global change and the effect of global cinema. We're not simply tied to the very limiting framework of U.S. film-making.

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)

I think that nudity is beautiful. Sometimes it can be awful, but when it's beautiful? Cinema is the art about reality; it's art from reality. In French we say l'art de la realite. You show reality, so you have to show bodies.

I just don't think there's a lot of support for the woman's voice in cinema, and it becomes really difficult to raise that money and start again every time.

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

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.

I became producer so that I could work with persons like him and to rock the world of Hong Kong Cinema a bit.

What 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.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

My fascination is not for cinema; it's for human nature and human beings because I find it quite difficult being one at times.

Nevertheless, in the theatre, and in the cinema, the contemporary reality of Poland has been represented only to a minuscule degree in the last 12 years.

First of all, on a cinematic [level], the film answer to that is that Roger Corman was creatively responsible for a lot of cinema history.

I play basketball, I surf and swim and go to the cinema and listen to music and read. I like shopping.

Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there. It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.

I like cinema audiences. I respect them, and I talk to them just like I would anybody I know.

Americans have a certain idea of what films are and the French have a much deeper sense of cinema. The cinémathèque is like a temple for them. And the people who write about it are really intellectuals. It's just a sensibility that they appreciate it.

I mean, "The Jinx" is an amazing piece of cinema and amazing television moment, it`s rare documentarians can feel the direct impact of their work.

I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema.

I love films where you go into the cinema and loosen the edges of yourself and you hopefully enter into the world of the film. You're watching something unfold before you. I prefer the idea of wonder or intense wonder over shock or something.

Cinema is much more than heroes and villains.

French cinema audiences usually don't express anything. Certainly not satisfaction.

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.

I've never done a film before where every single person in the audience knows the ending. I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days. People are blogging your endings from their cinema seats.

I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

It might be David Adjaye talking about how the structure of jazz music informs his architecture, it might be the musician Terry Riley talking about how he thinks so much about cinema. I'd love to see more of a rupture between mediums and a flow between them.

I make every movie and every scene like it could be my last. That's the only way I know how to make cinema that stands on its feet. I have to treat it like that. It has to be life and death stakes.

I think people need to understand that with plays and with cinema, when you hear about it, call and get a ticket then or go and see it then. It's especially with the play, which I can do because it's a limited run.

In the U.S., some extraordinary movies have been made on politics and social issues. We learned lots of things from American cinema. But in the last ten or fifteen years, this has changed drastically. Today, that kind of movie is much easier to make in Europe.

Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh - they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh's Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia.