Quotes About Cinema

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.

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 know there is one kind of cinema that exists in the world, that is good or bad cinema.

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

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.

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."

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.

I believe there's only good cinema and bad cinema.

What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

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.

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.

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

Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.

Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.

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.

I'm a huge fan of world cinema, because each country uses cinema in a very individual way.

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 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.

My favourite movie is: "Dr Strangelove". (I haven't seen any films released in the past 2-5 years, I'm afraid: I don't do TV/cinema).

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.

I was inspired by Maya Deren because she was the first woman filmmaker whose films I saw. I also loved Fellini and Goddard because they were so different from Hollywood films. But when I saw the cinema verite films that were made by Drew Associates with Leacock and Pennebaker I found my passion.

I'm an eclectic and avid filmgoer. I try to see everything from romantic comedies to blockbusters to art house films, world cinema and documentaries.

I like watching film, I go to the cinema, but a lot of times I go to see kids' films.

Film is something that reaches so many people. How many people are going to go into a gallery? And understand what they're seeing? I think about the guy walking down the street, the guy who drove me here - this guy has the opportunity to go the cinema.

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

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 would tend to be drawn to independent cinema as a viewer, probably more than the big blockbuster.

I was utilized because I have a certain face that works well in cinema, and I'm used to making myself look as good as possible

The quality of mainstream cinema has changed. A lot of independent voices feel they can leave everything behind and make independent films.

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.

There was a period of cinema, in the mid-90's, that I was a huge fan of, with Heat and Seven, and the Tarantino era. If I've ever been fanatical, it was about those films.

I became producer so that I could work with persons like him and to rock the world of Hong Kong Cinema a bit.

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.

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.

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.

I like cinema audiences. I respect them, and I talk to them just like I would anybody I know.

It's basically how I choose movie roles. Would I like to see this movie? Is this movie important? Why would I do this? And Headhunters is a movie that I would like to see in the cinema. And when it's sold to 50 countries or whatever, for me it's a great deal. I make movies for an audience so if that audience grows, I feel really honoured and thankful for it.

It is not easy to grow old in this business, when you are a woman above all, in the cinema.

It was Vikram Bhatt and 'Raaz' that got me interested in the medium of cinema. Before that, I was like any other youngster dabbling with various things - modelling, films - without a definite direction or focus. Now that I'm working with all of them, life has come full circle for me.

When I go to the cinema, I want to have a cinematic experience. Some people ignore the sound and you end up seeing something you might see on television and it doesn't explore the form. Sound is the other picture. When you show people a rough cut without the sound mix they are often really surprised. Sound creates a completely new world. With dialogue, people say a lot of things they don't mean. I like dialogue when it's used in a way when the body language says the complete opposite. But I love great dialogue I think expositional dialogue is quite crass and not like real life.

There are no rebels in the cinema business.

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.

When I go to the cinema I watch all different kinds of films.

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.