Quotes About Film

I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation. There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage. But in a movie, it has to be real, and the characters have to look entirely real because it's being done as a faux documentary, so there are even fewer actors that can do that on film.

I guess my first digital movie was 'Tintin' because 'Tintin' has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It's 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I'm still planning to shoot everything on film.

When I make a film, I never stop uncovering mysteries, making discoveries. When I'm writing, filming, editing, even doing promotional work, I discover new things about the film, about myself, and about others. That is what I'm subconsciously looking for when shooting a film: to glimpse the enigmas of life, even if I don't resolve them, but at least to uncover them. Cinema is curiosity in the most intense meaning of the word.

See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of.

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 amazing fact that one person can make his own film - I think animation is somewhat unique in that respect. I don't need to deal with lawyers. I don't need to deal with corporations. I don't need to deal with executives or agents or any of that. I can just sit at home and make a feature film. That's a wonderful experience. Each film I make gets more popular, more press and makes more money. So it's amazing that I've survived and actually prospered doing that sort of homegrown, cottage-industry filmmaking.

Every single Pixar film, at one time or another, has been the worst movie ever put on film. But we know. We trust our process. We don't get scared and say, 'Oh, no, this film isn't working.'

My favorite film is "Meshes in the Afternoon," a short avant garde film directed by Maya Deren. This was the first film that I saw that was actually directed by a woman.

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.

Various studios are still shooting on film with digital grain and the DI negatives, it's not ideal. We should really be all film or all digital. But that being said, the old way of graining in the camera, now you can make changes like a painter. It's dangerous because you can ruin the film, you can over-fiddle. We've all seen films and gone 'what the hell is that?'

I don’t use an exposure meter. My personal advice is: Spend the money you would put into such an instrument for film. Buy yards of film, miles of it. Buy all the film you can get your hands on. And then experiment with it.That is the only way to be successful in photography. Test, try, experiment, feel your way along. It is the experience, not technique, which counts in camera work first of all. If you get the feel of photography, you can take fifteen pictures while one of your opponents is trying out his exposure meter.

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.

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.'

Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness.

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.

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?

In my opinion, having worked in the games industry and still keeping in touch with a lot of those guys, there was definitely a time when they saw themselves as the little brother of the film industry. But they kind of went off in a different direction and now see themselves, I think, as being far more interesting and ahead of the film industry. They haven't just caught up. They've gone off in a different direction and exceeded the film industry.

I think that what people abroad want from French film, inside French film becomes our worst fear, "Oh, another film about love!"

At the end of the day, regardless of whether you're doing a huge budget film or a small budget film, you still want the film to do well, and have people see it. That's the whole point. You want to put some kind of message into your films, and you want people to see it.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club's a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn't look at Panic Room and think, "Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire". These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They're not particularly important.

At the end of the process we called a market research company to find out whom the film was for or what was the target audience. We didn't have a lot of money to release the film, so in order for it to play in cinemas, which are dominated by films with much larger marketing budgets, we had to discover whom the film was for.

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.

I have skipped from style to style from film to film, and I love doing that because it's given me the ability to free myself from the past. Perhaps one of the worst feelings that I can have is the feeling that I'm locked in, like a prisoner of myself, which is something we all feel at some point in our lives. So part of making those stylistic jumps is just to free myself up-to get away from the old or the old Oliver Stone.

Well, actors get very frustrated with giving control to other people. They have their own ideas and wants for their characters. Warren Beatty once told me that he thought actors ended up directing out of frustration. If you have a strong sense of how to communicate a film, you should direct. The problem is that it is a huge commitment. I'd rather direct a play than a film due to the time. A movie can tie you up for a year or more.

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 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.

Sometimes I work on film sets. I've done this for 40 years. I always wanted to photograph on the set of an Ingmar Bergman film. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity.

You do the work and you want people to see it; but, um while I'm doing the work, the result doesn't matter at all to me. Ultimately, I don't, I don't care whether the film is - you know - some big giant box-office bonanza and I don't care if its a complete flop. To me, when a film gets made and it's actually finished it's a success. They're all a success in their own way.

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.

The deal was we had to have people accompanying us and they would ask us not to film something [in North Korea]. For example, we wanted to film at a certain place and there happened to be a building under construction and it didn't look as fancy as the other buildings, so they wanted us to shoot where everything looked finished and made a good impression of the cityscape.

Up until the middle to late '60s, it was a choice to film in black-and-white or color. But then television became so vital to a film's finance, and television won't show black-and-white. So that killed it off, really.

I was doing the promotion for Moon in LA at the same time that Tony Scott was there with [The Taking of] Pelham 123. But obviously he was so concentrating on his own film that he didn't even know I was doing a feature film.

My job on a film is to be responsible for all the sounds in the movie besides the music. Together with my team, we work on the dialogue, foley, sound effects, and sound design. We work closely with the director and picture editor in the prep period, and then together with them, the sound mixers, and music crew, we collaborate on the final mix of the film.

I was at a Madonna show many, many years ago and I was in the sweet spot and she came out and I mean it was the best part of the show. And I was shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting. And I'm like, "God, I must have shot a hundred pictures have I not run out of film?" And I opened the back of my camera and there was no film in there. So that happened to me only once.

I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.

I think the biggest challenge was being aware of a certain audience that was going to see this film [lone survivor]. There's a big difference from a typical movie, journalists and critics and film goers that go see it find that, that's the general experience you have as a filmmaker. So that just kind of proves my point that there's a really different audience.

It's hard to get a film, you know, you need a very special film to be able to get that experimental. But, I would love to see that happen. I would love the opportunity to be more experimental than I am.

I thought I should try something relatively inexpensive, relatively contained, relatively small. I started working on a feature, a film I'd still like to make: a very talky film of people and ideas about our contemporary state with regard to relationships, marriage, sex, and romance. I started trying to educate myself about filmmaking.

It is said that anyone who does commercial cinema is not acting, and anyone who does an art film is acting. I don't believe it. I feel whenever you are doing a film, you are acting. So you need to be applauded for that. I won't do art house cinemas. I want to make commercial films. I want my films to make money.

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.

If you make a film about a pig farmer in Wales and you are a huge hit as the pig farmer's wife, the next thing is you'll be asked to do a film about a sheep farmer in Scotland.

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.

I made films with my brothers and my cousins and if any of the films ever come to fruition my career will be in ruins because the acting, writing, and directing is so unbelievably, heinously bad. We once screened one for my grandfather, this film that we had painstakingly made over a couple of days when we were all 10 years old, and he sat there and he said, "This is the worst film I've ever seen." No sympathy whatsoever.

I wanted to be in film. I wanted to be a film student, possibly be a director or cinematographer, not an actor. That was my goal. I didn't believe I had the physical beauty that I'd seen projected and advertised in movies, in theater. It just wasn't for me.

I think somewhere in the '90s, it started to shift, and you started to see a lot of film and television actors doing theater, and producers using the notoriety of the film and television actors to sell tickets.

Often it's true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

You go to the cinema and you realize you're watching the third act. There is no first or second act. There is this massive film-making where you spend this incredible amount of money and play right to the demographic. You can tell how much money the film is going to make by how it does on the first weekend. The whole culture is in the crap house. It's not just true in the movies, it's also true in the theater.