Quotes About Film

I left film because I felt that photography was my art. It was something I could do on my own, whereas film was so collaborative. I thought as a photographer I could make something that was artistic and that was mine, and I liked that. And it wasn't until I got back into film and I have very small crews and I could do very tiny filmmaking that wasn't 100 people that I still felt that I was making something artistic as a filmmaker. So, you know, I'm an artist, and whether it's photography or film, I want my voice to be there and I think my voice is very strong in this film.

To me, a revolutionary film is not a film about a revolution. It has a lot more to do with the art form. It's a film that is revolting against the old established language of cinema that had been brainwashing the people for decades. It is a film that is trying to find ways to use sound and image differently.

"Fish Tank" [my favorite woman-directed film] by Andrea Arnold. The film is so beautifully shot, and I love the raw energy of Katie Jarvis, who plays the main character, Mia. She is not a professional actress and she provides the film with a sense of realism. To me, the film feels so complete and superior.

You know, in an ideal world, people would just be intrigued and go and see a film without knowing anything about it, because that's where you're going to have the most experience of a film, the biggest, the most revelation of a film. But at the same time, I think there are benefits of having seen a trailer where you actually look forward to seeing moments in a film knowing that they're coming up. I don't know which is better.

I'm a believer that people need to understand that filmmaking is not a perfect process for anybody. It is a process in which you find the film and the film finds you. And that is every film.

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 think films are about having a good time, so I don't know that there's a message. The message of a film is always what a critic writes, and the fun of a film or the emotion of a film is what the audience feels.

The idea of watching an entire film basically from one person's perspective - and not even really from their perspective, but [it's] probably the most intimately shot film that's in any of these categories. If you're not familiar with Son of Saul, basically it's a film about a Jewish guy who's in concentration camp, but he helps dispose of the bodies after they leave the gas chamber. So, you watch the entire movie looking at Saul's face and looking at his interactions with people.

One must go for a film with an open mind; a film best impacts you when your mind is a blank page to the film.

I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don't have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. I never know where the story will go but I just keeping working on the film as it develops. It's a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, that's the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it.

The kind of sleep that I had during my own film [Certified Copy] screening in Cannes is different. It's not because of the specificity of the film. It was because of my relationship as an author to this film. Usually when I take my films to festivals, I feel incredibly anxious about them. I wonder how it will be received, how the audience will react. I feel deeply responsible for them. Whereas this time, I didn't have that responsibility on my shoulders.

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 think the power of the short film is incredibly underrated. It is way easier to get someone to watch a 15-minute film then a full-length feature. In those 15 minutes you have the opportunity to express your voice as an artist and hopefully connect with your audience. If you are trying to be a first time feature director then a short film that demonstrates you have a grasp on the themes and concepts of the movie you want to direct is a no-brainer. Whether they are collaborators or potential investors, filmmaking is a visual art form so you obviously need visuals to show them!

NYU Film School was the way to learn about film, to be exposed to film, to go to repertory houses, to be exposed to New York and see films. I would go to the library and see one, two or three movies a day.

It's the interaction between those characters that really makes that movie as special as it is, and I'm proud to say, as you probably know, it was the highest grossing film of 2012, it's the highest grossing film that Walt Disney has ever put out, and it's the third highest grossing film ever, in the world.

If you're a film fan, collecting video is sort of like marijuana. Laser discs, they're definitely cocaine. Film prints are heroin, all right? You're shooting smack when you start collecting film prints. So, I kinda got into it in a big way, and I've got a pretty nice collection I'm real proud of.

Nowadays, when you make movies, you don’t need any lights at all. You have to remember, back in the day, the film stocks that they had were very, very insensitive and they would have these humongous lights and lighting was everything, so everyone looked good. Nowadays with digital film where you don’t need any light at all, you could shoot in the [bleep] dark. It makes people not look so good and it makes aging on film much, much harder.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.

I meet all these American filmmakers that film for months and months, and it's a mystery to me. I couldn't make a film like that. I have to be very clear in what I'm doing and where it's going, and be very disciplined about what I film.

You do the one film that you think is terrible, but it's a big studio film and you hope you'll get another job because of it, because blah blah blah, whatever it is. You know that you hate it, you just couldn't care less if it got made because it's not something in a million years you'd go and see yourself. And it ends up being shite and you just knew it was shite to begin with, and it doesn't do you any favors at all if someone thought you were in another shite film. So I decided it doesn't get me anywhere being cynical. It's not that I want to be.

The Company of Wolves doesn't belong in any category, so it's difficult to prepare an audience for it. It's not a horror film, it's not a fantasy film, it's not a children's film - so what is it?

First, there has been a lot of interest in The Drive-in, but, alas, it hasn't actually come to fruition. Maybe soon. Don really got Bubba and I didn't think it could be a film. I thought it was too odd to make it to film. He asked me to do the screenplay, but I declined. I didn't see that it could be a screenplay but he wrote one and proved me wrong. He was always considerate about what I thought about the film and the story's presentation, but in the end, he's the director and he had to make decisions. All good ones.

I shoot very little film. If you just do coverage you're shooting any number of potential films instead of just one, and I was shooting just one specific film. Film is cheap but time is expensive.

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.

The whole switch from film to digital has changed some of the ways I use color and the juxtaposition of light and dark. It's getting better with digital, the separation's gotten better, but I still feel like it's really flatter than film, so I do a lot of screening and subtle textural printing and painting on clothes for film to get it not to look flat.

I grew up in New York and I've always lived here, so I look at myself as a regular person. When somebody recognizes me from the film - and it can be a wide range of people, which shows the power of film - I feel like they're talking about someone else we both know. I just find it hard to believe that anyone would stop me to share how much they loved something that I was a part of.

Everyone in the Lotus Eaters is so concerned with appearances, but there's an emptiness under the surface that they're trying to ignore. We talked about the theme of perception versus reality a lot with mirrors and masks what people were wearing - and we shot on two formats; we shot it on film and on digital, and a lot of the night-time scenes are film, and it looks better, and people can put on a mask and they can go out there and show an artifice to the world.

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 like the variety. But basically my choice of films is a small intimate film. Quiet film, no action, just people in relationships. That's what I like the most.

I gladly, I voluntarily gave up the kind of commercial film career I had going as soon as I had enough money to finance my own films. I didn't make that money necessarily from the film business, but I eventually made a lot of money and that's what I do. Of course, I consider myself unbelievably fortunate, and I'm pretty content with my life.

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.

I loved making The Imitation Game and it's really gratifying to hear the audience's response to the character that I play. It was just a little thing that I did because I really liked the film and I liked Benedict [Cumberbatch] and I loved Morten's [director Morten Tyldum] previous film, Headhunters. For me, it was something I did thinking, "Wow, this is a lovely quality piece of work."

I have a great deal of respect for the craft, I don't know how much respect it has for me. But it's a precision process. Doing it on stage would be, I think, terrifying. Doing it on film has its own difficulties, because film is not conducive to spontaneity. You might have a run through and get a few chuckles at eight o'clock in the morning, but you don't keep laughing at the same thing all day long.

I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927)

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.

When you're watching, I find two things happen. You either watch a film and it's really good and then you think, "Why can't I do that?" Or you watch a film and it's not good, and you think, "Why am I doing this?" So either way, it feels like being at work.

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.

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 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.

That's such a big part of film scoring that people don't realize. There's a portion of film scoring that's writing the music, but a lot of it is how do you get along with the guy you're working with, how do you interpret what he wants? It's so subjective, you know? Your version of sad is probably different than my version of sad. It's my job to figure out what your vision of sad looks like.

If I hope to survive, I have to acknowledge the natural selection that goes on when film stocks and cameras are eliminated from the world. And film viewers won't want to watch the same thing over and over again from me.

I'll tell you a little fun fact about the film, though. Me, the little boy playing Chip, Emma Thompson, and Emma Watson, all have the same birthday. We were all in on the same day and they all sang us "Happy Birthday." That will never happen in my life again: Four of us having the same birthday on the same film, and we're all in on the same day. It was an extraordinary thing.

What I want to do is make things that I think people want to watch. I'm a film fan, so I think I'm in touch with other film fans and that they might want to watch stuff. The other reason I really don't care is because no matter what you do in life, no matter what you wear, or what you say, people are going to like it or they're not. And that is all. Everything, down to the socks I chose today - people are going to like them or they're not and there's nothing you can do about that.

One of the reasons I did this, because I wasn't really looking for another science fiction film, was that my daughter can see it. She's 9 and it's really a good film for all ages.

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.

I would never say someone's else's film isn't 'a real film.' The quote is inaccurate.

Every time I see a film or TV show, I think about how that composer made those choices and how that director envisioned music and how that could work onstage or in a film and how you could support that even further by putting lyrics to it.

You know, this is such a rich time that we've just been involved in, and there's really a job now for historians. Film is still very young. This is the first hundred years of filmmaking. So I think it's important that we have some sense of history and continuity. Especially in film.