Quotes About Cinema

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

What is most important is that the brand African cinema is going beyond African cinema.

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.

I think Hollywood has gone in a disastrous path. It's terrible. The years of cinema that were great were the '30s, '40s, not so much the '50s...but then the foreign films took over and it was a great age of cinema as American directors were influenced by them and that fueled the '50s and '60s and '70s.

If you're going to break cinema, film, and movies apart, very rarely to you get the opportunity to even think that you've been a part of 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.

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 love cinema. I think the risk of the aesthetics being fixed is compensated by other advantages. Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

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.

Any story that gets us thinking, and particularly young people, thinking why? Whether it's as a result of reading the book, or coming out of the theatre or the cinema, I think we should just simply be asking the question 'why'? Why did it happen to those people? Was it necessary? And anything that gets us thinking like that is really important.

Cinema has become my life. I dont mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

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.

I loved cinema while growing up and, for the longest time, wanted to be a director.

The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.

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 think the performances that really communicate with me are the ones where I don't feel like I'm watching someone and thinking: "They're doing some really good acting." It's when I'm literally completely consumed by the story-telling and the actor or actress is evoking something in me. I think that's so powerful and cinema and TV has so much power.

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

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas. But wood can translate ideas, too. You have wood and then you get a chair. Some ideas are for different things.

I knew that this was the movie in which a lot of the cinema version of Burton-esque first started. So, I knew that there were things that were hugely important to him for it, but it didn't really feel that different than working on any other of these projects.

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

Cinema has no boundaries...we all belong to the same artistic community.

What makes international cinema so interesting is that each territory has its own sensibility. When you look at an Indian or French film, there's a certain flavor. And even though the language is different, if the film is successful, it has something very common and understandable.

One of my assistants was on Instagram and showed me how it was working. I thought it was playful, the way you go through images, a little like cinema. It's a bit like a filmstrip that's animated by your finger.

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.

Cinema is a territory. It exists outside of movies. It's a place I live in. It's a way of seeing things, of experiencing life. But making films, that's supposed to be a profession.

I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early 60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them.

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.

I do feel like my music, in some weird way, is probably better suited for cinema than for anything else - I can't really explain, other than I think that music has been mostly inspired often by soundtracks.

I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in.

The best cinema is about ethics.

Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day.

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 has opened a world of possibilities up for me.

Nevertheless, in the theatre, and in the cinema, the contemporary reality of Poland has been represented only to a minuscule degree in the last 12 years.

Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world.

So what'll happen is there'll be some very good cinema experiences are going to see 3D where you have to pay more. And there'll be some bad experiences of going to see movies in 3D. And I just hope that this kind of gold rush mentality doesn't kill what could actually be something that really, really benefits the industry.

So the Lincoln movie gets trashed because Connecticut voted for the amendment - not to mention how the people in Connecticut feel - but there's a lot of that. And I think it precedes from a fundamental misunderstanding of cinema. They are entertainment. And I'd like to say that entertainment isn't a synonym for disposable or mindless or stupid. Hamlet? Pretty entertaining from where I come from.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?

The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.

I think cinema is better today that you can be more daring with what you do. If you do it well. With that comes a responsibility not to bore people with vulgarity and all that stuff. To know how to do it right, know how to lay it out there.

When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood - all the stuff that comes. When you put a sound to something and it's wrong, it's so obvious. When it's right, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That's a magical thing that can happen in cinema.

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.

Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.