Quotes About Cinema

My cinema - the '50s, '60s - is different from the cinema today so I thought that it would not be bad to show that kind of cinema where we could dream.

In a way, this is what the difference is between Hong Kong and Chinese cinema - Chinese cinema was made for their own communities. It was for propaganda. But Hong Kong made films to entertain, and they know how to communicate with international audiences.

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.

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

To evoke the classic period of Italian cinema in a little film seemed like a great, fun thing to do. I had relations to that period. I had known Fellini and I had known Antonioni. I had made a movie with Antonioni and I had visited Fellini in his studios. So, it seemed like something worthwhile doing. You bring yourself to that mythical cinema.

I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?'

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.

Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work. Just yesterday I saw a good film, but even if I'd seen a bad one, I'd feel, "Oh my god, what a bad job, I can do better."

Do we recognize the platform that Indian cinema has been given? Of course. And typically India of us, we gracefully acknowledge our host's grace and we thank you for celebrating us and our cinema.

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

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.

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

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.

Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you'd call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days. So I don't know what my future is. I don't have a clue what I'm going to be able to do in the world of cinema.

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.

I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist.

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 wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

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.

Secret Cinema has created a new way of experiencing film. The fusion of film and theatre allows for a much more powerful experience and adds an incredibly unique dimension for the audience. It certainly did for me. I was blown away

Growing up in Hollywood, like I did, I have a passion and a love for the movies, so I go to the cinema all the time.

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.

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.

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.

I wouldn't want to do a Bollywood film per se, but I would like to do an Indian-language film. For some reason I think Bollywood has become synonymous with commercial cinema, which is song and dance and everything that is larger than life, and I am interested in the reality.

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

Since I was a baby my goal was to be on TV because film was just impossible - you never got any Asian women in Western cinema. I grew up wanting to be in 'East-Enders' because film wasn't even a dream. The community were very much like, 'How can you want to act? It's such a low-class profession.

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.

A book is a book, but a movie is a movie. The more faithful you are, the more you'll come up with Harry Potter #1 and #2, which are like filmed books on tape. They're so petrified of turning off the readers that they make no concessions to the fact that they're trying to make a piece of cinema.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

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."

Cinema is entertainment, and people go to the movies because they want to feel good and forget about everything.

If I'm in theatre, cinema doesn't even cross my mind. Similarly when I'm making a film, theatre doesn't cross my mind.

I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium.

The chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads.

The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all — that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open — has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?

I would not like to have a homogeneous type of film. I wanted to go to many different kinds of ways of making cinema and telling stories and watching the country.

Without claiming superiority of intellectual over visual understanding, one is nevertheless bound to admit that the cinema allowsa number of æsthetic-intellectual means of perception to remain unexercised which cannot but lead to a weakening of judgment.

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.

I suppose I am gently cynical about notions of who we think we are, but I certainly don't hate my fellow man. I think my cinema, although it might often deal with death and decay, is highly celebratory.

There are no rebels in the cinema business.

All the people I've met, many outside of cinema, knew everything perfectly about one thing or one subject or one area.

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

I've really only had one (dream) since I got into this business at 13 years old, which was to be in this business forever. Once I did my first television commercial, I caught that itch and that bug. I want to be a part of pieces of art - as far as cinema is concerned - that people will want to see for generations to come. That's my dream.

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.

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.