Quotes About Film

I got into film in an odd way - when I was 17 years old I participated in a Swedish film as an actor. I think every person at that age should get a role in a film, because during that time you want acceptance, and when you have a role in a film you become an important person. I think about that now, and that was my fantastic starting point.

Film maker Andi Olsen has a wonderful short film called Where the Smiling Ends. She waited at the Trevi Fountain in Rome and filmed the tourists only at the moment after their photos had been snapped, the moment their smiles dissolved. It's genius and heartbreaking. I think about her film when I explore the places the strips malls meet the wild world they are eating up.

Upon its debut, The Room was a spectacular bomb, pulling in all of $1,800 during its initial two-week Los Angeles run. It wasn't until the last weekend of the film's short release that the seeds of its eventual cultural salvation were planted. While passing a movie theater, two young film students named Michael Rousselet and Scott Gairdner noticed a sign on the ticket booth that read: NO REFUNDS. Below the sign was this blurb from a review: “Watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head.” They were sold.

I was the female lead in a romantic comedy. It's a little indie film that we shot in China called 'America Town,' starring Daniel Henney and Bill Paxton. I actually had to speak Chinese in the film. It was funny because I found out I was doing the film and then a week later, I was in Shanghai.

Not only do I look at the playback with the actors, but I look at the on-set assembly footage with the sequences with my actors as well. These are the reasons why I take twice as much time to shoot a film in Korea. Thinking back, I remember on my first ever Korean film, I never used any playback or on-set assembly, so all I had to do was to tell myself it's just like making my first ever Korean-language film. After that, I felt right at home.

I wanted to be a playwright in college. That's what I was interested in and that's what I was moving toward, and then I had the lucky accident of falling in love with film. I was 19 or 20 that I realized films are made by people. Shooting digitally became cheaper and better. You couldn't make something that looked like a Hollywood film, but you could make something through which you could work out ideas. I was acting, but I was also conceiving the plots and operating the camera when I wasn't onscreen. I got very unvain about film acting, and it became a sort of graduate school for me.

I approach every film I do in the same way, whether it's an action film or not an action film. I guess if a certain physicality lends itself to action, but I started acting before I reached puberty. I was 7 years old when I started acting. It wasn't until I became a bouncer in New York.

I really discovered [Dr.Strange] through hearing about this film and first meeting Scott [Derrickson] and getting into it and just opening up and saying, "Okay, this is, like all comics, very much of its era," and my first question was, 'How do you make this film? Why do you make this film now?' and the answers were so enticing that I was like, "I'm in."

Promoting a film can get tiring but if you find a clever way to promote it, it can be fun. Also, it is not fair to yourself and the film if you don't promote it. You've worked hard for the film for the past six or eight months and then if you don't give it your all and create awareness among the people then it is not fair.

I was one of those avid moviegoers as a kid, and we didn't have video, so we went to see everything five times. I went to see every foreign film playing in my town. As times went on, I watched a lot less films. I have a different film school now. My film school now is my life experience.

It's Steven's [Sebring] view of what he saw in traveling and working with me. But on another scale, I think the film [Dream of Life] is very humanistic: It touches on motherhood, death, birth, art, laundry, anger against the Bush administration... While I don't think it's the kind of film where one goes to find some of the darker, edgier aspects of life, the film was born of grief.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion.

There are some audiences who are uncomfortable with the ambiguity, though. They want a film to chew their food for them, they want Hollywood endings that tie everything together in the end and answer all of the questions. They are usually people on one extreme of the political spectrum or other and they haven't been happy because the film is not polemical enough on their side. They aren't usually people who aren't interested in understanding points of view that they disagree with - they just want to attack their opponents - and I'm ok with them not liking the film.

When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was 'You're a Big Boy Now.'

In America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience.

The way you set up for a sequel is by having a successful film. The focus is on making a successful film, and making a film that travels around the world, and that people enjoy and have fun with, and that people are able to escape with.

The research period of a film is the most exciting part of the process, and filming is sometimes a letdown because when you're dealing with biopic material, the real thing is always much more intricate than the story told in the film.

There are always differences when you adapt a novel to a film. A novel is longer so you're automatically cutting out elements and introspection but this is actually a film that stays very close to the novel.

Clearly any film company that makes a film is always going to talk about sequels particularly if they see something as being successful, which Werewolf was.

When I used a woman in my films or wrote a woman into my film, I wanted her to be a central point and a motivating point or a catalyst to function in the film.

I made a film called "The Theory of Everything," which is based on Jane Hawing, who was married to Stephen Hawking - it's based on her book about their relationship.That's what the film will be about - they were both incredible, strong, willful individuals and I feel like that Stephen Hawking himself would say that he wouldn't have survived without the influence of Jane Hawking, and they were an incredible team together.

Whether youre making a million dollar film or a $100 million film there is never enough money, theres never enough time.

It's a simple thing he [Frank Daniel] taught me. If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.

I'd never been to Africa. This really was my first film [The Lost World]. I'd done 10 years of stage. I'd done a little bit of television. But this was my first film.

I was able to lean on people for favors and things to help out because their budget was so low. It was half of what John Travolta's perk package is on a film. Our whole budget was half of what his staff makes on a film.

I'm a character actor but unlike a lot of character actors, I don't look radically different from film to film and there was a bunch of them at once.

I didn't start out thinking that I could ever make films. I started out being a film lover, loving films, and wanting to have a job that put me close to them and close to filmmakers and close to film sets.

When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.

I don't usually see what I've done. I don't often watch the film or watch the show. It's really about that experience on-set and within the scene. Because later, when the film comes out or the show comes out it's the editor's realm or the director's realm. But that moment on set, that's that electricity between me and another actor, and that's really what excites me.

If I ever thought of directing again, I mean - I don't know, even the idea of directing a film is a strange one for me, because I feel kind of anti mathematics in a way in that sense. Anti - I don't like when things make sense, I prefer if they don't, so if I made a film, it wouldn't make any sense and no one would see it. So maybe I'll just make little films at home with my phone, never to be released.

It's always fun to get to do independent film because I believe that that's the life blood of film. It's about writers and directors who truly have their own vision, and that's hard.

Casting a film, you can have the greatest actors in a film and it doesn't work. It's a combination of all of the elements.

You want the film to be critically successful - you certainly want the film to be financially successful so that you can...well, because that's how movies like this are made, you know, they need to make money. But as a director, you can only make the movie that you want to make.

I don't think his life has been in any way disfigured by the film. The film did disclose some difficult facts.

There's no appreciation for the giants [of jazz]; there's never been a major film on Duke Ellington , never a major film on Louis Armstrong. What they accomplished, we could never accomplish today...What's happening now is lightweight compared to what happened before. If Louis Armstrong was alive today, he'd be a superstar. If Art Tatum was alive today, my god, all the piano players would get on their knees. So that's what's missing today; we've been cut off from our heritage.

Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.

I have had several offers to make the book into a film. I don't know if the message could be accurately transmitted, and so I have been somewhat hesitant in granting film rights.

I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.

Film is a great tool to play with time, going back and forth through time, or speeding time up and slowing it down and do stuff like that. That's something you can't experience in real life that you can experience on film, and it takes you to a different place.

In film, a dancer should always be shot from head to toe, because that way you can see the whole body and that is the art of dancing. Nowadays they shoot the nose. Left nostril. Right nostril. Hand. Foot. Bust. Derrière. The film prevents you from determining who is a good dancer and who is not.

If you make a film normally it's all right, the distributors are helpful and cooperative. But if you make a film that's a little stange, a little bizarre, then all the time it's a struggle with them.

Every time an actress is celebrated for her great work, I cheer. For the more brilliant their performance, the more the audience demands stories about women... And as we all know: a great year for women in film, is just a great year for film.

I put so much pressure on myself to raise the bar with each and every project. I treat it like every film is my last, and I make sure I pour everything I have into every film I make because if I'm not trying to improve, someone else will.

I wanted to create a film that hadn't been created yet. I studied film for many years. The Room is almost 20 years of my work. You see, I understand young people unlike the media. I don't expect people to love The Room 100% but I respect that people enjoy it and that maybe it opens certain doors for them. That's what makes me happy.

You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.

I found the people to be very kind and generous. It was unique because the crew was mainly Ugandan [filming The Last King of Scotland]. They had never done a film before. So, they were learning the process of making films, but at the same time they were also helping with the authenticity of the film.

For me, filmmaking is an ongoing self-reflection process. I kind of push everything to the edge. I feel very exposed and fragile when I make a film. It's a process of dealing with loneliness. And it's also very dramatic - because while you are working on a film, you just realize how incapable you are of dealing with all these things. And you open yourself up, and it's like your heart is utterly exposed. And it's very tiring on a daily basis.