Quotes About Film

With The Exorcist we said what we wanted to say. Neither one of us view it as a horror film. We view it as a film about the mysteries of faith. It's easier for people to call it a horror film. Or a great horror film. Or the greatest horror film ever made. Whenever I see that, I feel a great distance from it.

For example, how you would introduce a leading character into your film, and as an absolute ingenious example, [Elia] Kazan in his film Viva Zapata!, how he introduces his leading character Marlon Brando into the film. No film ever did it as wonderful as he did it.

A successful film is a good film, and a non-successful film is a bad film. It's as simple as that.

I went to Oberlin College, and they don't have a film major, but they do have what's called an individual major, where you can sort of pitch to a committee your own course study, and if they approve it, you have essentially just designed your own major. So Oberlin doesn't have a film major; they do have a film minor... And then my spring semester of my junior year, I went off to NYU film school as a visiting student - they have a program for kids from other schools to come in for a semester.

I never want to make a film. I don't wake up in the morning going, 'Ooh, I'd really love to be on set making a film today'. I'm aware that other contemporary film directors perceive film-making as what they do, as what they have to do. But I would hope that I am more catholic in my tastes.

Personally speaking there's only so long you can go from film to film to film. There's an inspiration an actor gets from the stage.

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.

There's something that happens where you go, if you're lucky, goodness me, from film to another film to another film. And you can sort of feel that if you step off that treadmill, it might all go horribly wrong and you might never be employed again, you know. And I suddenly thought that that's not necessarily the case. And I also thought we make drama as actors about people in the world and that if you are on that treadmill, you start making films about other films.

Film is so much to do with perfection and how differently you can feel about someone at the beginning of the film and the end of the film.

I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.

My job is to make a film that can sit as a standalone piece, that if it's the only Marvel film you see, it's a great film with a great story in and of itself. The lucky thing is that there's a bunch of geniuses who run Marvel that make sure, even if it's a standalone piece, that it's part of a great big jigsaw puzzle that could be appreciated as a whole as well.

Film is a narrative format. Some fashion films try to retain some of the poetic mystery, but most of the time they only end up looking like some crappy, pretentious film-school thing. So I think the interest in film is really about the fashion world finding another form of expression.

Some things definitely work better on film than in books. Introspection is great in books but it doesn't work on film. Anything with high intensity, whether it's a love scene, a car chase, a fight scene - those things work so well on film and oftentimes they can tell a much broader part of the story.

If it's a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means that it's a failure. That is what I think.

You also convert real memories, whatever that means, into film versions of those memories. Because by the time you've finished the project you can't remember the real memories anymore, you just remember the film versions of them. And then if the film failed you have distaste for them. So I don't think about that stuff anymore.

The film The Conquest will be seen on many different levels and the American point of view is always more technical. The French are less technical - it's 'I like it, or I don't like it.' I hope that this film can have a life in the U.S. - it's the grand country of cinema. I grew up with Hollywood movies, so for a French director to have a film distributed in the U.S. is a real opportunity.

That's the process of making the film and it isn't until the world puts their eyes to it that you find out if it's creating any kind of connection at all. But every single film at some stage of the film I think, "I wonder what this is going to be?"

The first thing I say when people ask what's the difference [between doing TV and film], is that film has an ending and TV doesn't. When I write a film, all I think about is where the thing ends and how to get the audience there. And in television, it can't end. You need the audience to return the next week. It kind of shifts the drive of the story. But I find that more as a writer than as a director.

I did not want 'Battleship' to be perceived as an American war film. I wanted to do everything I could to make the film accessible to a global audience. It felt like bringing an alien component to the film would help take the American jingoism out of it.

I've always believed that if you want to really try and make a great film, not a good film, but a great film, you have to take a lot of risks.

If I hear a film clip, or I happen to see some image from a film - you go to a film festival, and they show some clip of the movies you've been in, most of the time I sit there and go, "Oh God, I should have... should have... that was terrible." But I think that's a natural part of this work, because really, your work is never over. Of course I can leave it alone and walk off the set and never think about it again when it's done. But your work is really ongoing all the time.

I hate to write and spend months just waiting for the film to get financed. Then when you start preparing the film and you shoot it, you've already forgotten why you wanted to make the film in the first place. I like to have some kind of coherent energy that takes you through writing, preparing, shooting.

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.

There's a film there in competition [of Sundance Film Festival] called To The Bone. It's directed by Marti Noxon. I have a supporting role in it. It got really well received. It's a really great 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.

I think that every film should have its own structure, and that's the beauty of film language - is that we get to express that deeply individualistic side of ourselves.

I certainly don't feel like I am desperate to run away from a film set. I love the hustle and bustle. Everything is sort of mad right before a take, and then it just settles, and you've got these two minutes of a bit of magic. I just love that in film.

I may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together, and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about.

I did this film for less money than it costs to stay in this hotel. We shot it in 20 days. We couldn't screw up takes for fun because we didn't have enough film.

I think it's a fascinating thing to see how lonely people are in this world and what they're looking for. It's a universal concept. So, it's something that interests me and I'll probably revisit it if I get the chance to do the child soldier film because I think it's one of the most important scripts I've written. It's just too dark to do as a film right now. I need to do something a bit different.

I don't think you can be involved in film and not be a fan of theirs. The one that I just go back to and can watch anytime it's on TV and I'll watch to the end, is Fargo. I think it's, like, a perfect film, it's genius.

I'm so happy and relieved for the indie spirited film world because ... I don't even know if it's indie, it's just alternative cinema that's just different than what the studios are doing and it's a big variety in that category. Everyone always is complaining about the film industry but I think it's important to acknowledge when it's actually a pretty good time when that comes back around. I'd be remiss not to say, "Hey, it's a pretty good era right now for these reasons," and maybe that doesn't last or maybe it does, but I will acknowledge it.

A period romance film with elements of horror. That was successful, because I feel like Coppola's DRACULA was one or the other. You know? It was never scary it was never a film he got invested in the romance of the characters. He understood it, but he never got invested. So it as a challenge for me to see if I could do that, I still don't know how audiences will sort of react to that.

Ten years ago in Antarctica shooting "Encounters at the End of the World," I met a very fine volcanologist from Cambridge University [Clive Oppenheimer] and we kept talking about doing a film and all of a sudden it became serious when he hinted at the possibility to film in North Korea.

Well, the experience for me making a film is the most profound one. I really don’t have any business watching the movie so much. Maybe I could watch it for entertainment purposes, but you have so little input and control of the final product once you’re done that I feel like I just would rather leave it alone. It kind of leaves me in a place where every film I do, I’m kind of having to reinvent and figure out how to start again fresh, and hopefully not repeat myself.

I just feel like it's so amazing every few years when I'm not making a film to act and basically go back to film school and just watch other filmmakers work and try to be a part of somebody else's vision. So I feel like you do use two very different parts of your brain, and it's great to be able to jump back and forth.

The way the recession has affected Hollywood, a lot of actors that had robust opportunities before in film no longer have such plum options, so cable has done a good job of becoming a happy medium for artists deemed film actors.

I don't know when the last time was that Steven Spielberg or George Lucas made a movie with Universal, but I can tell you that Universal is leading the charge. They're looking at film differently. They're planning ahead in a way that I've never seen a studio do before. They're believing in a relationship between fan and film franchise, in a new way. They're more receptive to an audience, in part because of social media, in a way we've never been allowed.

Each performance and each film is what it is. It's right and belongs within that moment. You look at it and try to make it fit your particular part of your character and your particular film.

In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry.

When you make a documentary film, after many years the only thing you remember is what you put into the film, not what you took out.

For me, I can't tell you if the film is good or bad, all I can say is for me the film is way better than I had expectation of us being able to make. So for me that's the most important thing. Have we exceeded our dream in terms of what it could be?

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.

Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose.

I'm terrified by young people who are doing what they think is film making. What they're really doing is taking that convulsed, fast rhythm of commercials. It's not film making.

When you go to a film festival as an audience member, it's so much fun. But when you bring your own film there, you carry so much stress and excitement.

In music, we can still record analog and then do the post production in digital. In film, sooner or later, we're not even going to be able to film because they won't be able to process. The labs won't exist anymore. You'll just have to do it with digital.

A gem of a short film has a sense of pure joy in animation that is different from anything you see in a feature film.