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.

Film writing and concert writing are two very different things. In film writing I am serving the film and it tells you what to write. I have to stay within the parameters of the film. In writing concert music for the stage I can write anything I want and in this day and modern age rules can be broken.

I was playing in a band and was approached to score an independent film. I had never done it, but had written instrumental music, so I figured I could do it. Turns out I loved scoring the film, and took on another couple films before realizing that if I was to be an effective narrative composer, I should study the craft of composition. I stopped taking projects and got a degree in orchestral music composition, and followed that with film scoring studies. Near the end of my degree studies, I started taking on student films as a way to get back into film scoring.

"Bruce" was an Eddie Murphy film, so there was a whole different vibe, working on that film, as opposed to working on a [Adam] Sandler film, which I'd done a few of. First of all, there were tons of kids running around. I'm surprised I ever had a kid after doing that film.

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.

I would say the three stages of making a film are the initial 'are we gonna do this,' 'how much will I be paid,' is there a lot of nights, who's it going to be with? The second stage of doing a film is how much fun your going to have doing it. The third stage is was the film a hit?

Basically, actors arrive in a bubble. They have a little sealed bubble around them and it's basically [comprised of] their agents, their last film, their next film, their press agent, and their per diems - all these things, they cocoon themselves with and you have to puncture that bubble on each of them to make them be in your film.

Theater is such a different ballgame than film. And that's really why I stayed in film, because I really love the reality of connecting with your own feelings, and really putting that across in a realistic way. In film, the smallest muscular movements in your face, that are produced just by sheer feelings, you're not controlling them in anyway, can be seen by people in the audience because your face is sometimes, frighteningly, 40 feet wide!

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.

Not only do I look at the playback with the actors, but I look at the on-set assembly footage with the sequences with my actors as well. These are the reasons why I take twice as much time to shoot a film in Korea. Thinking back, I remember on my first ever Korean film, I never used any playback or on-set assembly, so all I had to do was to tell myself it's just like making my first ever Korean-language film. After that, I felt right at home.

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.

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.

It's very important that a film that intends to play tricks on the audience... has to play fair with the audience. For me, any time you're going to have a reveal in the film, it's essential that it have been shown to the audience as much as possible. What that means is that some people are going to figure it out very early on. Other people not til the end. Everybody watches the film differently.

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.'

The film is a direct mirror of the director. If your director doesn't know how to dress, there will be an aesthetic of the film that won't come through - whether it's in the costumes if he doesn't know exactly what he wants or the look of the film.

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.

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.

The new Bond film, will be a big, big hit, because every Bond film is an event. Fathers take their sons to it; probably grandfathers. It's been a long time, and I think that the success of Bond is because the audiences have never been cheated by the producers. They always spend every penny, put it on the screen, and then the things that people expect to see in a Bond film - big action scenes, glamorous ladies - it's pure escapism.

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.

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 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.

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.

Rain Man certainly didn't test really well. If you look at it carefully, you have a disease autism they didn't understand back then, they didn't know in the test audience whether it's okay to laugh or not laugh, because it's a film that's done in a way where, "Well, maybe I'm not supposed to laugh." At the end of the film, Dustin Hoffman gets on the train and doesn't even acknowledge his brother. Not even a glance, nothing. That's why the studio said, "Can't you just have him look at Tom Cruise at the end of the film?"

The film that really struck me was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. That was a film I watched many, many times and found endlessly fascinating in it's density. I think the density of that film is primarily visual density, atmospheric, sound density, moreso than narrative density.

Plays are literature: the word, the idea. Film is much more like the form in which we dream - in action and images (Television is furniture). I think a great play can only be a play. It fits the stage better than it fits the screen. Some stories insist on being film, can't be contained on stage. In the end, all writing serves to answer the same question: Why are we alive? And the form the question takes - play, film, novel - is dictated, I suppose, by whether its story is driven by character or place.

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.

Since I knew I was going to make a film that was purely about emotions, and I knew that I ran the risk of being accused of amnesia relating to the social film, to prevent this I decided it would be good to have characters who were on the margins of society. These are characters for whom love is really the only way to know that they're alive.

[When accepting the American Film Institute Life Achievement award] I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat (Patricia Hitchcock), and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville.

It's definitely a unique situation that we're in. And, yeah, it is difficult not having our ringleader here with us to talk about the film [the Waitress], not having our main person here. People are also asking in relation to the film: what would Adrienne [ Shelly] say about this or that? But I don't know. I don't know what she would say.

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.

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.

When I was shooting the film I did not see the story as an everyday tale or a social one. To a great extent, the film is a mythological look on human life. This is probably what I would like the audience to keep in mind before they enter the screening room.

When I was in Hungary in December I was looking at student films and I could not tell which ones were shot on film and which ones were shot digitally. I think that is because the filmmakers in Europe go to four years of film school and learn the techniques.

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.

Being the executive producer of a film is not that difficult. It just means that you have some power. There's not a huge amount of skill involved, I don't know how much I'm giving away here. I feel like that guy on Fox, giving away the magicians' tricks. It's not rocket science, being an executive producer of a film.

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.

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.

I'll need every ounce that I have to drive it through. Film and TV require that energy. Sometimes fight scenes can be pretty intense. When I was shooting "Heaven" it was truly guerrilla film-making.

I'm very manipulative towards directors. My theory is that everyone on the set is directing the film, we're all receiving art messages from the universe on how we should do the film.

I try to express in my films things that no other art can approach. In my monster films for example, I use special effects in the same way one would use a special film stock, a special camera, and so on. Monster films permit me to use all of these elements at the same time. They are the most visual kind of film.

I was on this boat in the middle of the ocean scuba diving for this film I did, and I was with actor Mackenzie Cook, who is in it as well, and I didn't have my phone on me. The producer of the film handed me over this phone and said "someone is on the phone for you Gemma," and here I am completely in all of the scuba gear on with the tank on, and a helmet. My agent just went "dum, dum, dum, dum"(hums Bond theme song), and I just knew then, and I went ahhhh madness, and I was over the moon.

The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images.

The film 'Slumdog Millionaire' portrays the spirit you feel in India. For those who haven't been there, the film says it all.

I believe when you're writing film or television, you can't rely on a crutch or rule that exists outside of the narrative of the film.