Quotes About Cinema

Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. The only true cinema verite would be what Andy Warhol did with his film about the Empire State Building - eight hours or so from one angle, and even then it's not really cinema verite, because you aren't actually there.

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

There 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.

You 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.

Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second.

The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life. But Hollywood has forgotten that, in the past, what made Hollywood great and what made it go ahead was the fact that Hollywood was fed with, for example, Jewish directors coming from Germany or Austria and enriching Hollywood. In 15, 20 years, Hollywood became imperialistic. Cinema goes ahead when it is marriaged by other culture. Otherwise, it turns on itself.

I seem to wonder if we can reach some kind of new destination with cinema, or touch upon human existence in a different way to what cinema usually does in its very schematic and sometimes very controlled, plot-oriented ways of thinking. Sometimes I feel like I've found the holy grail, and next week I think it's a complete mistake and I need to try something completely different. It's an ongoing process.

There are large numbers of people in India below the poverty line, there are large numbers of people who lead a meager existence. They want to find a little escape from the hardships of life, and come and watch something colorful and exciting and musical. Indian cinema provides that. So yes, the content of our television and our cinema is escapist in nature because we are there to provide entertainment.

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.

For a long time I have compared cinema to music, I think cinema has a lot to do with the rhythm of music.

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.

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

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.

Cinema Paradiso' is a fantastic film, I love that.

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.

Some of the most successful, talented actresses of our generation, be it Julianne Moore, or Charlize Theron, or Charlotte Gainsbourg, or Isabella Rossellini, if you know your cinema history, have taken their clothes off. There's nothing wrong with nudity, per se, if it's part of the storytelling and it's eloquent and it says something about the raw humanity of the story.

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.

Musicals and horror films can be very non-verbal and very pure cinema with movement. The camera is justified in being a character. It can really move and tell a story, and literally direct you to look here or there.

Hollwood creates useful entertainment. There are millions of people on earth who need distraction and American cinema fulfills that function.

The 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.

In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.

There are thus two tasks for the Mass Media division of Unesco, the one general, the other special. The special one is to enlist the press and the radio and the cinema to the fullest extent in the service of formal and adult education, of science and learning, of art and culture. The general one is to see that these agencies are used both to contribute to mutual comprehension between different nations and cultures, and also to promote the growth of a common outlook shared by all nations and cultures.

I 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.

I live cinema and passionately love music, and my efforts in both these crafts are unfolding.

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

To the leaders of the cinema still to come, I can offer only a few words drawn from my modest experience. You must ceaselessly formulate and sharpen your critical views, both of others and of yourselves.

Romance: That's one of the things that makes Spider-Man really unique, in terms of the comic books. There is a tender, romantic quality to it. And certainly, that's something that's always fascinated me about the cinema: good romance.

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

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.

For me,it is very important to believe in the kind of movies I do. Rang De Basanti made me feel good about Indian cinema. The movie instilled in me,a confidence so strong,that I wanted to be a part of the revolution in Bollywood.

The 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.

People often criticize my films for being pessimistic; there are certainly many reasons for being pessimistic but I don’t see my films that way. They’re founded in the belief that revolution doesn’t belong on the cinema screen but outside in the world. Never mind if a film ends pessimistically but exposes certain mechanisms clearly enough to show people how they work and the ultimate effect is not pessimistic. My goal is to reveal such mechanisms in a way that makes people realize the necessity of changing their own reality.

I really have problems with horror movies. I don't watch them. It's a feeling I don't want to have in cinema. I'm too reactive. It's too draining to watch that kind of movie.

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.

With cinema, one of the great lies dating back to its origin was "It's just entertainment! It doesn't make any impact" Like the great Samuel Goldwyn said, "If you've got a message, send a telegram."

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!

People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people's minds to lazy minds.

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.

Everybody else, they're wonderful, but [Robert] Duvall sets the tone for all of cinema acting. So just to be in his space was amazing.

In terms of making TV drama, not everything has to make sense. In cinema, you usually strive for reality and a natural environment, but in TV, it's more acceptable to do something crazy and break with naturalism.

Some holiday traditions are sacred. In our house one such tradition is the annual Christmas classic cinema celebration.

I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I'm always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking - although I want good talking. I'm much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth. My goal is always what Chuck Jones wanted his Warner Brothers cartoons to be, which was if you turn down the sound, you could still tell what's going on.

There's still a 1950s view of cinema, that there's one audience and they all want to see the same thing.

Cinema really lends itself well to big, archetypal stories, you know, classic old stories and you need kind of a weird, big terrain like the Japanese plains for Samurai movies or the West. You need that for these giants to walk around.

These commercials, I directed them all from inside the tracking vehicle, so I was traveling about 85mph most of the time, so there wasn't really anyone sitting beside me other than the driver. But, you know, yeah the agency is there and VW is there, which is- they're paying for it all and also because the agency created the boards, they want to make sure that you're not going off the rails in executing it. And also they can help, because they- it's a very different thing to cinema.

I come from an everyday middle class family in India. The film industry reached us only through our television sets and cinema halls.