Quotes About Cinema

I think what I loved in cinema - and what I mean by cinema is not just films, but proper, classical cinema - are the extraordinary moments that can occur on screen. At the same time, I do feel that cinema and theater feed each other. I feel like you can do close-up on stage and you can do something very bold and highly characterized - and, dare I say, theatrical - on camera. I think the cameras and the viewpoints shift depending on the intensity and integrity of your intention and focus on that.

I don't really follow television so much, but in the old days there was a certain way TV was, and it wasn't really like cinema. I don't know how many ways it was different or the same, but it was not quite like cinema. Now, cinema can happen on television.

In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.

If you say one gets influenced watching a character, I think its foolish. Cinema reflects society; society rarely reflects cinema.

I've always been drawn to a certain kind of dark aesthetic in cinema and in film, to what's abjected or considered abject. I've been tremendously influenced by noirish cinema whether that's Von Sternberg or Scorsese in the 70s or Lynch, etc.

I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.

I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them.

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 It has been replaced by celebrity news.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 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.

Music just gives me so much energy and inspiration. Music and literature in a way probably influence me more than cinema does because they're different forms and yet related. I probably know as much about music history as I do about the history of cinema.

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.

. . . it is true that language and forward movement in the cinema are jolly hard to reconcile. It's a very, very, difficult thing to do. . . . There is still a place in the cinema for movies that are driven by the human face, and not by explosions and cars and guns and action sequences . . . there's such a thing as action and speed within thought rather than within a ceaseless milkshake of images.

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 prefer working in good cinema, wherever it is. I like subjects that have a universal appeal.

As soon as I get my car I think I'll be going to the cinema more. Since I don't go very often, there are no films that are a must see at the moment. I usually wait till they come out on DVD.

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

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

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 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.)

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

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.

When making a film, I'm never concerned about whether the theme is new or whether it's been done before in cinema or not. I'm led to make films if there's a theme that interests me or I experience something in my own life that confronts me with something that I want to deal with.

I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.

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.

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 idea that cinema can be dangerous is a great idea.

I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman, What he has left is a legacy greater than any other director.... I think the extraordinary thing that Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value.

Cinema has opened a world of possibilities up for me.

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.

The convergence of the Rhone and Saone. Paul Bocuse. The birthplace of cinema. Chateauneuf-du-Pape just a few miles down the road. It does not get much better than Lyon.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

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

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.

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.

Cinema is still a very young art form with extraordinary techniques and very impressive special effects. But sometimes it seems the soul has been taken out of things.

I can see that cinema seems to be finished. Everybody has a bigger screen at home. I'm assuming eventually you won't need a screen at all - these iPhones will just project.

I have always been clear that cinema is not my priority and that my family is.

I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

['American Dream' will be released] probably never.Never in the United States because there's no room for independent cinema.

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.

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.

In my mind it's so much fun to have something that has clues and is mysterious - something that is understood intuitively rather than just being spoon-fed to you. That's the beauty of cinema, and it's hardly ever even tried. These days, most films are pretty easily understood, and so people's minds stop working.

I have no problems with the NC-17 rating. I want more NC-17 films. More adult cinema!

I didn't have a normal academic career. I never studied cinema. I learned from life.

I want to become actor not because I want money and become more famous. No I don't want that. It is not that l want stardom, I want to contribute to good cinema.

My career in the movie business began in Hong Kong, my heart has always been tied to Asia, and it is immensely gratifying to see international recognition for Asian cinema as a whole.