Quotes About Cinema

I know why I make films -cinema is a mode of expression that allows you to express all the nuances of a thing while including its opposites. These are things that can't be quantified mentally; yet they can exist and be juxtaposed. That may seem very contradictory. Cinema allows you to film these contradictions.

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.

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.

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.

There's a whole, that is a whole subgenre within martial arts cinema. The supernatural martial arts movie. Particularly within Asian cinema.

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

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 love cinema. I think the risk of the aesthetics being fixed is compensated by other advantages. Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

Napoleon is pure cinema, and cinema was designed for sharing.

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!

Cinema has become my life. I dont mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

I never really had any intention of getting involved in documentaries until the opportunity came around. I always thought much more in classic fiction cinema terms and I think I tried to apply those ideas to documentaries and not vice versa.

I love silent cinema but don't hold it sacred. Like any branch of film there are some very boring films alongside the masterpieces.

Cinema 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.

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.

I never got in this business, in cinema, to make horror movies. They arrived on my doorstep and I got typecast. Which was fine, I enjoy it, but I got into this business to make westerns. And the kind of westerns I used to see, they died. So that didn't work out.

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.

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.

An 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. There’s not a rabble-rouser in sight. There was still one, but he went beyond troublemaker to court jester. He clobbered the status quo. That’s Godard. We’re fresh out of ‘bad students.’ You’ll find students masquerading as bad ones, but you won’t find the real article, because a genuine bad student upends everything.

I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early 60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them.

Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.

All the great advances in cinema came about from technology. The 3-D camera was not invented by a movie director. The new industries are driven by the innovations in science and technology.

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.

Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!

A myth is a fantasy, a preferred lie, a foundational story, a hypnotic trance, an identity game, a virtual reality, one that can be either inspirational or despairing. It is a story in which I cast myself; it is my inner cinema, the motion picture of my inner reality - one that moves all the time. No diagnosis can fix the myth, no cure can settle it, because our inner life is precisely what, in us, will not lie still.

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.

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.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.

For me, being Christian Armenian, born into the Islamic culture in Iran and then, at the age of 13, being sent to England and embracing the English culture and becoming part of so-called swinging London and the era of euphoria and celebration that the '60s represented is very critical. It was a moment when, for the first time, the business of internationalism was being effectively represented-in music, art, cinema, design. Before that, everything was directed toward the old industry, the old school, the old format, and there was no room for varieties to evolve.

It's basically how I choose movie roles. Would I like to see this movie? Is this movie important? Why would I do this? And Headhunters is a movie that I would like to see in the cinema. And when it's sold to 50 countries or whatever, for me it's a great deal. I make movies for an audience so if that audience grows, I feel really honoured and thankful for it.

Cinema is much more than heroes and villains.

I lived right on the borderline of a black neighborhood. So I could go into the black area and then there'd be these ghetto theaters that you could actually see the new kung fu movie or the new blaxploitation movie or the new horror film or whatever. And then there was also, if you went just a little further away, there was actually a little art house cinema. So I could actually see, you know, French movies or Italian movies, when they came out.

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.

Cinema is gambling. It is better to gamble on a unique film even if it seems like suicide.

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.

Studio movies are looking more like independent movies and independent movies are looking more like studio movies, and I think cinema is better now because of it.

Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.

I remember queuing around the block in Sheffield when I was growing up. At that time, going to the cinema was really something special - there was something about the style of the real thing that is immeasurable nicer than multiplexes.

People go to the cinema to be moved; they wanna laugh, they wanna cry, they wanna feel something deeply, especially if they're not feeling deeply in their own lives.

For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.

I think you do have to attend to the sort of core values of film, which is that the audience wants to have a relationship with the characters, they want to understand what's going on there. There are certain things that comics can have a little bit more freedom in then when you're asking an audience to engage in it as a piece of cinema, but I do feel like the canvas is much bigger and wider and that we're being invited and frankly challenged to take risks, to be a little bit different. And that's fun, that's exciting.

Each time I had an internship to do or an essay to write, I would always do it in the field of cinema. Nobody in my family worked in film and nobody could understand it.

One of my great all-time loves in cinema, and I've seen it three times, is Bondarchuk's 'War and Peace.' Not a lot of people may have seen that film. It was made during the Soviet era.

It took a while for me to grasp that my colleagues believe I have made an impact on the history of cinema.

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

Whenever I'm asked about independent cinema, I think of what Fidel Castro said during the Cold War about the league of non-aligned nations. He said that really, there were only two non-aligned nations: the U.S. and the USSR. The rest of us have to be aligned somewhere. I say similarly, in a way, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros. are the only true independents, because they're the only ones who can do whatever they want and have distribution for their films built in.

For me cinema is not primarily entertainment. I don't watch fun blockbusters myself.