Quotes About 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.

A message I've been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can't do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now.

I like action movies, even though I think action movies are kind of derided now. But there is something extraordinary about action movies, which is absolutely linked to the invention of cinema and what cinema is and why we love it.

War is cinema, and cinema is war

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.

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.

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

Narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verité is film in its purest form. You're taking random images and creating meaning out of random images, telling a story, getting meaning, capturing something that's real, that's really happening, and render this celluloid sculpture of this real thing. That's what really separates the power of doc filmmaking from fiction.

There's a difference between watching a film and watching a bit of cinema and enjoying a film as a piece of cinema.

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

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 just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.

The cinema industry is competing against everything else people can do on a Friday or Saturday night. If they don't have a good time, you're going to lose them to something else. So much of what we do is trying to make the Alamo experience special.

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.

Cinema will always have an important role to play in society.

The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.

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.

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.

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

I read reviews of critics I respect and feel I can learn something from. Right now there are a lot of bottom-feeder critics who just have access to a computer and don't necessarily have an academic or cinema background that I can detect, so I tend to ignore that and stay with the same top-tier critics that I've come to respect. I like reading a good review - it doesn't have to be favorable, but a well-thought-out one - because I very much appreciate the relationship of directors and critics.

I think cinema should provoke thoughts, sure, but using it as I soapbox I think is the wrong place.

We like people who look good, we like people who elevate our standards, who have things we do not have, it's all about our fantasies. Yes, you can make millions of people dream about somebody who's not good looking, and that's the beauty of cinema, but people don't take the chance that often.

Of course it's true: the public want to see young people - young people are the people who go to the cinema. It's a sad fact of life, but you've got to accept it and not whine about it.

Today's cinema is a proliferation of comedies, which are in some ways creating caricature images. They're one-dimensional.

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.

I think it’s important that nobody forgets that although Hollywood commercially dominates the world cinema, in fact what comes out of the filmmaking here is only a tiny slice out of the massive amount of operation that goes on around the world.

Movie queens diffuse into Cinema haze, while libertines read pornozines in street cafes.

Cinema is always a political art, at the end.

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.

But Hitler didn't strive for the annihilation of the Jews - he stressed that fact in public life and in the newspapers. Hitler merely said at the beginning that Jewish influence was too great, that of all the lawyers in Berlin, eighty percent were Jewish. Hitler thought that a small percentage of the people, the Jews, should not be allowed to control the theater, cinema, radio, et cetera.

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.

I love these kind of movies as a kind of cinema-going geek myself. Those characters, you want to be like those characters when you go to the movies. You know, when you see a movie with a guy who's really cool and the killing's slick and easy. I don't know. There's something intoxicating about it.

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

The idea that cinema can be dangerous is a great idea.

I wanted to direct when I was very young. I had no idea of cinema, of who's doing what. That was my first instinct: "Okay, I want to be the boss."

Vivek Oberoi is the most over rated actor in Hindi cinema

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.

How heartening it is to know that Ken Loach is still out there making committed, polemical cinema, so long as you don't have to watch it. Never go near a Ken Loach film unless you're trying to sleep with a socialist. If you are, however, Land And Freedom should do the trick.

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

I don't go to the cinema much.

Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.

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.

If people go to IMDB, they will see that I'm very comfortable with independent cinema, and doing studio films too. For me this is not an either/or situation.

One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.

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.

I think 3-D across the board both in a home format and cinema is, it's going to be very big.

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.