Quotes About Film

My best film is always my next film. I couldn't make Chungking Express now, because of the way I live and drink I've forgotten how I did it. I don't believe in film school or film theory. Just try and get in there and make the bloody film, do good work and be with people you love.

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.

Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: ‘the book is so much better than the film.

A film just doesn't involve actors, a director and a producer, there is also the cameraman, the sound engineer, the music composer, the lyric writer. So many people come together to make a film. When we all feel satisfied with the film that we have created it's a win for all of us.

I applied [to film school] figuring, "I need to find some structure for myself. I need to find a way to figure out what kind of filmmaker I want to be." And that is what film school provides you with. It'll teach you the basics of how a production works and the technical side of how to put everything together, but you could also learn that by working on film sets.

I should say that feminism gave me permission to deal with my own emotional life and put it up front in certain ways, or use film as a way to examine, at that time, my own heterosexual experience. Lives of Performers was the beginning of that kind of investigation. But also, the film was influenced by the aesthetics and structures of experimental film as that was taking place at the same time. Hollis Frampton was a big influence on me at that time.

Now there's always exceptions to that and the reason is if the film doesn't really work, whereas before you could rely on a decent amount of DVD sales to prop up the revenue to ensure that you got out in a decent manner, now if the film doesn't work, the film doesn't work and there's none of that DVD revenue to fall back on and you can lose a huge, huge sum of money on a big budget movie.

A few of my books, over the years, have been optioned for film. The subject matter of my books, however, is not exactly conducive to Hollywood film treatment. If and when a 'big-budget' film is ever made based on one of my books, my fans and I will more than likely loathe it because it won't be true to its source. That's almost a given.

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.

The challenge in writing the songs for The Aristocats truly fell on the animators & director of the film. Robert & I wrote the initial songs for the film, just prior to leaving full-time employment at the Walt Disney Studios. Therefore, some of the songs we wrote for The Aristocats were never used. I believe, therefore, the challenge fell upon the makers of the film to select what songs made the final cut.

It's a matter of pride to me to get the film done fast, to get it done well. I understand the need for compromise. There is no such thing as a perfect shot, a perfect film. The purpose of film is not to make a monument to oneself.

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'd like to do a film in Canada, but it's too difficult. National Film Board funding takes too long, and there's too much paperwork; by the time the film is approved the topic is dead and gone.

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

I don't make movies. I don't feel that I have to have artistic control. Part of this comes from the fact that the book lives on no matter what Hollywood does to your novel in terms of a film. Now, you try to be careful who you allow to do your film because nobody wants their novel to become a turkey movie. But, on the other hand, it is a crapshot anyway, because even the best people can make a bad film.

I'm planning some films in the U.K., and it will have pros and cons. It takes a lot more time to set up a film in the U.K., because you can't rely on much. In Greece, friends show up and bring what they can and you make the film. Well, that's a bit simpler than how it really is. But when you make a film with proper industries, it takes more time to synch all these things.

Most young people make films to be accepted, to be discovered, when in fact that was the last idea with the group I went to film school with. To be discovered was not our intention. Our intention was to tell our story our way, and make our own mistakes and learn from film to film.

There hadn't been one done since the late 70s. I was living in Brooklyn, had no connection to Roger Corman, to no one in this movie. I didn't go to film school. I'm like the person who should have never made this film. But I just decided to put one foot in front of the other. I was writing film articles for magazines at the time. I convinced an editor from one of the magazines that I was working for to give me a shot to do a piece on Roger. This was an excuse to go meet him.

My hope is that the film Wall Street 2 will actually serve as a way for us to bridge that gap between Wall Street and Main Street. Certainly that's dealt with in the film of how it does affect everybody, so, you know, I always find that when you can create a movie or a play or a book that gives somebody a safe theoretical place to discuss what is really going on in the day it tends to forward discussion, so that would be my hope coming out of the film.

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.

Film team kept me very, very shielded when I was that young, because of course, I was seven years old. You know, you're still kind of reading. It's still kind of like, "Cat." "Dog." "Ann jumped over fence." So I guess in a way it helped me progress in school, too, because I was reading so much and memorizing so much. But they kept me very shielded from everything that was going on in the The Amityville Horror. I didn't know anything, basically, about the film. I just knew that it was a scary film. I wasn't allowed to watch it. I can watch it now, I'm just too scared.

One of the earliest memories I have of feeling the power of film music was watching Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. That was a really clear epiphany for me, when I realized that each film has its own music, and that there was someone out there who wrote this very specific music for just this one film.

Making a film is like raising a child. You have to be there every step of the way, guide it, provide for it, and finally let it go into the real world and hope you have done a good job. If you don't absolutely love your film then you will loss interest in it and the movie will suffer.

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.

The reason I live in America is because I mean literally every six or seven years I've done something in England. The last lead I had in an English film I did was 1998. So that's why I live here. It's because I get more work. I'll travel back for radio, you know what I mean. I've just got to consider myself to be living in the middle of the ocean, and that way I have a really nice career, if I'm prepared to do television, radio, theater, and film.

In The Shining, you love Shelley Duvall. You love Jack Nicholson. You're let into the intimacy of that violence and it's emotional and it's physical. We're let in very close. So I think a good horror film has to pull you in very deeply inside. Halloween is a good horror film because we love Jamie Lee Curtis, we're brought very deeply in right when she's babysitting the kids. She's going from house to house, all those houses have windows that you can look in. We're a very vulnerable and exposed audience.

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

A favorite film of mine is 'Office Space' and I love 'The Hangover.' That is a really good comedy from character in that film, and that is true of 'Office Space' too.

I went to graduate film school at NYU, and at first I didn't get a degree, because I took a scholarship that was supposed to pay my tuition, and I used it to make a film. For the longest time, I never actually graduated. And about 70 percent of the things I learned there I had to unlearn, but 30 percent was really valuable. It's like Mark Twain said, "Don't let school get in the way of your education."

I like the smell of film. I just like knowing there's film going through the camera.

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."

There are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

You learn quite a bit about your film from test screening audiences. With both comedies and movies that are intense, you need to calibrate the film and see how audiences react.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I haven't been one since I did a film called (coughs) Encino Man (laughing). After two or three runs with Pauly Shore, I had enough. Watching this film in 3D as far as rollercoasters go really fills it for me.

The difference between film and theater is that in film, an actor is sort of under a magnifying glass and everything that they do, just the smallest movement, is very detectible.

I've gone out of my way to not take baggage with me from film to film.

I wouldn't want to do a Bollywood film per se, but I would like to do an Indian-language film. For some reason I think Bollywood has become synonymous with commercial cinema, which is song and dance and everything that is larger than life, and I am interested in the reality.

When you shoot on film, you don't know whether you've got it or not until you get the film processed, and so it changes the relationship we have with the subject whether it's a landscape or a person in a so-called controlled environment in a chair in a studio in front of you.

I try to follow my instinct as a moviegoer and I do the thing I would love to see it at a movie. I'm like everyone, almost, I go to a movie once a week. I like every kind of film if it’s well made. I’m fine. I’m not a specialist fighting for a genre of film. You just have to follow your instinct.

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.'

Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders.

Some people manage to make that transition from child actor to adult actor seamlessly. But I felt that if I spent my whole life on a film set without taking a few years to do something else, all I would ever know about was film sets.

You don't have that interaction with the audience when you're acting for film; you're kind of acting in a vacuum. You're acting for a disinterested grip who just wants to reply to his wife about what time he'll be home for dinner. Everyone else on a film set is also there because they're paid to be there. They're not there because they're passionate about what you do necessarily.