Quotes About Film

It makes it very easy. I have a beginning, middle, and end, and I don't film for long - about 20 hours usually for a two-hour film - so it's easily watchable in a week for me and the editor. Once I know who the characters are, I only film those characters, unless somebody else forces their way into the film by a scene happening to them or we meet them by chance.

On another level this film talks about that. We had tremendous freedom while making this film. We never thought about marketing. It wasn't a film made to sell merchandise or products or to reach millions of people around the world. It was a film made to say what I really felt.

Make film, shoot film, run film. Do something. Make film. Shoot anything.

I naively thought I was making a low-budget movie. But, when the film came out, the Daily Variety reviewer at that time who was named Art Murphy described it as an exploitation film. I had never heard that term before. Roger never used it. So that's how I learned that I had made an exploitation film.

All of my plays have puzzled some people, and I'm happy to say delighted a few, but a lot of people have just not seen how quite to look at them. And this film... if you like my writing, you'll like this film. If you don't, you won't like the film. It's pretty faithful to - it's a pretty uncompromising presentation of my way of seeing things, I suppose.

I would have to say I might do some stuff, but it's the film that's appealing. I was raised on film. My musical experience is all via film, it's not from classical music.

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!

(in the film "That's Entertainment!" - 1974) Thank God for film, it can capture a moment and hold it there forever. If anyone ever asks you: "Who were they?" or "What made them so good?" I think a reel of film answers that question.

I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?'

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 remember when I was like 19 years old and I started a desk calendar company to pay for my first short film, just so I could say one day that my daddy didn't pay for my first short film. And I really established myself in the film festival world.

We didn't create the culture of film. We certainly market it better than anyone in the world, but film could have happened anywhere. It's not distinctly American, as witnessed by the fact that there are film communities throughout the world that tell stories to their own cultural liking.

There are things that you could do with film that you could never do with HD. There's a warmth and an organic quality - almost a handmade quality - that goes into film. Film will always have a bit more of a humanistic feeling to it.

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.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

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.

I don't really get stuck in a time warp where, if my film is a success, I have to keep partying till the next one releases, or if my film is a flop, I keep wallowing in sorrow until the next comes my way. My hard work in each film is always there.

We just worked hard to not just get things right and authentic, but also to make it consistent and visually right. For instance, there are colours that aren't in the film that would have been there in reality. I think part of the look of the film not only has to do with the way it's shot and lit, but also the lack of certain colours that give it a softness which really suits it because there's more focus on the characters. For instance, there's no yellow at all until we get to Miss Stubbs' flat at the very end.

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.

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.

The thing that fascinates me is that the way I came to film and television is extinct. Then there were gatekeepers, it was prohibitively expensive to make a film, to be a director you had to be an entrepreneur to raise money.

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.

I think I have an obligation, to the people who have consented to be in the film, to make a film that is fair to their experience. The editing of my films is a long and selective process. I do feel that when I cut a sequence, I have an obligation to the people who are in it, to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time, in the original event. I don't try and cut it to meet the standards of a producer or a network or a television show.

I might do a film someday for the collection. I love designing sets and creating environments, in film school and for my own presentations. I love telling stories.

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.

When I think about directing a film, the thing that stops me short is wondering if I'm a natural at it the way I think you, and PTA, and Fincher are born directors. Maybe some people's talent is in understanding the ways that film communicates, without dialogue, without plot.

I have been in films before where people have been in a rush to label them as a Black film or even as a history lesson. These are ways to make the film feel niche and not for everyone.

The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.

I made a French film called "Merry Christmas" which is a very European film. It's a World War I piece.

My audience is comprised of three categories. The first category contains the people who decide after the first five minutes that they've made a mistake and leave. The second category is the people who give the film a chance and leave annoyed after 40 minutes. The third category includes the people that watch the whole film and return to see it again. If I'm able to persuade 33% of the audience to stay, then I can say that I've succeeded.

I really want to do a film in another language. My dad's from Germany, so it'd be really cool to do a film in German. I'm not quite fluent, but I can get there. And my accent's pretty good. I wouldn't feel too out of my element.

They say now in America that final cut doesn't mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some film-maker, 'You can have final cut. I'll open your film in Arkansas.'

There was a time when I first started that there was such a thing called 'a woman's film' and there were certain scripts that women would make. But I think that's changed a lot now. I think that if a woman director walks into a room with a script, it doesn't really matter what the subject matter is, or the genre is, so long as the financers feel that the woman has the skills to make the film.

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 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'm a huge Wes Anderson fan. I literally love every single film. He hasn't made a bad film; I've seen every single one. They've all been brilliant, from 'Bottle Rocket' up to 'Moonrise Kingdom,' they've all been wonderful.

I thought I was going to be a lot more freaked out by being naked onstage. I think on film I would have been more freaked out, because film is less forgiving. But onstage it's lit so beautifully. It would make my mother look good.

'How the West was Won' was very hard, because it was a three cameras technique, meaning three cameras wide. Therefore I wasn't speaking to my fellow performer, I was speaking to a camera, or a line next to the camera. It was difficult to do, because its not real acting. I had to pretend that I was 'seeing' Agnes Moorhead or Jimmy Stewart or Carroll Baker. I wasn't, I was acting to a drawn line. It took me personally two years to make the film, because my character starts at age 16 and I end up being 92 years old in the film. By the end of that production, I was ready for a long nap.

The film business has so many twists and turns that its a miracle any film gets made.

There's only one test of a great children's book, or a great children's film, and that is this: If it can be read or viewed with pleasure by adults, then it has the chance to be a great children's film, or a great children's book.

There's a difference between the way I see it and the character's interpretation of the events, so the rules within the film are the rules within the film.

I prefer to make a film that people have a really intense reaction to than have a film that people feel ambivalent about.

With film, oftentimes you work in a vacuum and then you get on a high wire and then you try it and then the day's over and that piece of film exists somewhere in a vault for 1000,000 years and that's it.

Some people call Police Story the greatest action film of all time, and while I have to be humble and say that I disagree, it's definitely the favorite action film I've ever made.

The first film is everything you want to say and how you want to say it. Lots of directors will do that and do it really well, but the second film is not so easy.

This fall I'm doing something I've never done before. I'm starring in a film, an independent film.

The strength of film is its accessibility and immediacy. But the strength of books is that freedom to really depict anything you want because people are going to be reading it in private. So, I'm always trying to write with the immediacy and the constant motion of film but I'm also trying to write with the complete freedom of subject matter that books have.