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.

If there's one thing that can save the novel, it is to make it independent of cinema, to narrate in a way that cinema can never narrate, using to its benefit those particular characteristics which belong to writing.

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.

The select group of people who do make realistic cinema, who do make cinema perhaps a little more acceptable to the Western audience, is a very small percentage.

I first came to cinema as a passionate filmgoer, when I was a child. Then, when I was a very young man, I became a film critic precisely because of my knowledge of cinema. I did better than others because of this. Then I moved on to screenwriting. I wrote a film with Sergio Leone, 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' And then I moved to directing.

My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby - but just me. Nobody else.

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

In the theater you can chain a blue-assed baboon in the stalls and with a good script, good actors, and a good set you'd have what is called a production. With the cinema someone has to know about lenses and fine things. I have no time for the "auteur de cinema." To me, it's meaningless.

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.

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

3D is very exciting. I love it. I'm a complete convert. Everything for me, from now on, is 3D. I'm completely convinced it's the future of home entertainment, as well as cinema entertainment. I think it's a paradigm shift, in terms of cinema, and those things don't happen very often. The introduction of sound, the introduction of color photography and now 3D have been the big shifts. They happen once every 40 or 50 years, so it's very exciting to be a filmmaker, working while one of them is happening.

I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

Well, you cannot think of cinema now, and you cannot think of cinema in the UK and not place Chaplin in the most extraordinary elevated context, if there can be such a thing, in that he was a genius, he was unique.

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.

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.

Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.

We have the talent, just not the money and not the audience. People in France don't really like fantasy. You need to go to Spain, England and Germany for that. Many of the people from my crew come either from Spain or England. But I hope to be able to work with them again and I wish to create European cinema on that scale. It could happen and attitudes may be changing. Animated fantasy movie Despicable Me was made entirely in France, so there is the talent here and now maybe the desire too.

Cinema serves as a constant reminder to us of who we are and what we are made of.

We have filmmakers who make films with some kind of responsibility and take cinema seriously like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Prakash Jha. But now these people also take stars Without stars they cannot work.

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.

An important Italian critic once gave Fistful of Dollars a very bad review when it came out. Then he went to the university here [Rome] with Once Upon a Time in America. We showed it to 10,000 students. And while the man was speaking that day to the students, with me present, he said, "I have to state one thing. When I gave that review about Sergio's films, I should have taken into account that on Sergio Leone's passport, there should not be written whether the nationality is Italian or anything else. What should be written is: 'Nationality: Cinema.' "

It is said that anyone who does commercial cinema is not acting, and anyone who does an art film is acting. I don't believe it. I feel whenever you are doing a film, you are acting. So you need to be applauded for that. I won't do art house cinemas. I want to make commercial films. I want my films to make money.

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.

I am grateful to theatre for making me what I am today. But it's not like theatre is my first love. I am equally attached to cinema, which is, actually, a child of theatre, since it borrows heavily from it.

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.

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.

The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.

My documentaries have always been very much constructed in the spirit of dominant cinema. From the time I started making non-fiction, I was mainly interested in designing and creating documentaries like fiction, so it was a natural evolution to try and embark on doing a dramatic narrative.

Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

I just don't think there's a lot of support for the woman's voice in cinema, and it becomes really difficult to raise that money and start again every time.

I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.

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

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.

I think that it's not a bad thing to not be too versed in the vocabulary of cinema, because you start to think that certain things are allowed and not allowed.

It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen.

I think the problem with the cinema currently is that so much of the money that goes movies that offer a certain kind of repetition.

The cinema is there to heighten the imagination; I have always tried to make sure it does so.

The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.

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.

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.

Every medium has its own kind of freedom. I don't want to just cross from one to the next. I want to enjoy the freedom each one has. Sometimes, you can do something for TV that you can't do in the cinema.

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 grew up watching movies that just transformed my vision, not just in cinema, in life, and you discover that this - it's an endless tool.

I think film is a world of directors. Theater is a world of actors. Or, theater is for actors as cinema is for directors. I started in theater. Filming is as complete as directing film. In theater, you are there, you have a character, you have a play, you have a light, you have a set, you have an audience, and you're in control, and every night is different depending on you and the relationship with the other actors. It's as simple as that. So, you are given all the tools.

At a very young age I was allowed to go into the cinema and watch adult films.

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.