Quotes About Cinema

What I'm really trying to do is recreate classic Hollywood cinema and classic genre cinema from a woman's point of view. Because most cinema is really made for men, how can you create cinema that's for women without having it be relegated to a ghetto of "chick flick" or something like that?

Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.

The American public is a very specialized public. The reason it is taken as a realistic film is because inside the fable, I've put that kind of reality in. And it could easily be called, instead of Once Upon a Time in America, Once Upon a Time There Was a Certain Kind of Cinema. Because it was also an homage to cinema.

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'm inspired heavily by film influences - David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Pedro Almodóvar, and what I see in the cinema - so there is a linking, an interweaving between memory, cinema and contemporary life, which the women in my pictures encapsulate.

The movies that I do are in love with cinema, and I try to show that I am in love with cinema. I want them to be, in other ways, drinking from other sources.

Cinema d'auteur, cinema about people, about emotions. About la difficulté d'être, the difficulty of being, existential problems. That's what the nouvelle vague is. The early '60s was all about that.

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.

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.

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.

My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody.

The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life. But Hollywood has forgotten that, in the past, what made Hollywood great and what made it go ahead was the fact that Hollywood was fed with, for example, Jewish directors coming from Germany or Austria and enriching Hollywood. In 15, 20 years, Hollywood became imperialistic. Cinema goes ahead when it is marriaged by other culture. Otherwise, it turns on itself.

The movies I like are always movies where cinema is reinvented like if it was the beginning of 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.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things - we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.

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.

When you're so passionate about cinema, the idea to direct your own film is really appealing.

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.

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

I don't think I'm the world's most die-hard sci-fi fan, but I definitely grew up watching 'Star Trek' religiously - all of them: the original, 'Next Generation,' 'Deep Space Nine,' 'Voyager.' I think sci-fi has an important place in the cinema world. Fantasy is a big part of why films actually exist.

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

I'm an idol of cinema? Oh, wow.

I went to the Tokyo Film Festival in Japan because I love Japanese 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.

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.

An awful lot of filmmaking and playmaking is taken over by marketers and publicists, who set about to tell people what to think. And people feel safer that way. But it's not safe, and the whole wonderful thing that cinema and filmmakers can contribute is to go into the not-safe land of real life.

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.

I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.

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

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

Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite.

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.

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.

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.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

There's nothing better than having a collaborator that you have a great shorthand with and a great comfort with who's shepherding the project along. I mean, that's the best thing that can happen in cinema where there's many cooks in the kitchen.

Much to my chagrin, I think that cinema has gone the wrong way in America because in many ways, I pioneered the use of video which eventually became digital video. Everyone can do it; it's Pop Art time: "Everything is art, why should you take it so seriously, after all it's kind of like a clambake." I don't buy that.

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.

I love being part of a group who tells stories, whether it be in the theater or in cinema, and I love creating imaginary worlds rather as children do, but I never had a burning desire to act, but it just sort of suited me.

The page has turned. Cinema is finished for me.

I tell my children to avoid theatre and go into cinema and TV.

You can lose in cinema too if you don't put on a good performance.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

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

All the great advances in cinema came about from technology. The 3-D camera was not invented by a movie director. The new industries are driven by the innovations in science and technology.

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."