Quotes About Film

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

I'm ready for all forms of dialogue about the film The Conquest. There will be a lot of political talk, but I don't think the film itself will be scandalous. For the French, there are so many emotions relating to Sarkozy and politicians in general that I think the film will generate a lot of passion, whether it be negative or positive. Above all, it's a fictional film. It was important not to make a documentary and to really pay attention to the images. From the choice of the actors to the mise en scene, the film is completely cinematographic. It's not just a boring political movie.

Well cult is a word you would never say in Hollywood. In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, "Oh, my last film was a cult film." I'd say, "Oh great, well I hope this one isn't!"

My last experience of film-making was Tickets, a three-episode film in Italy, the third of which is directed by myself. It's not for me to judge whether it's a good film or a bad film, but what I could say is that nobody had a cultural or linguistic issue with what was produced.

Miracle at St. Anna.' I was challenged by Spike Lee. When he offered me the film, he looked me square in the eye and said, 'You start this film off and you end this film. I don't want a dry eye in the theatre. Can you pull that off?' He was dead serious.

A war film can be propaganda and they're very valuable as propaganda, as we realized in Britain in the Second World War. Film as propaganda is a very valuable tool. It can also demonize, which is the dangerous side of a war film as propaganda. But there are war films that are not propaganda. It's just saying 'This is what it's like.' For 99 percent of us we don't know what it's like. We have no idea. So to reveal that to the audience is powerful.

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 for a film that has real theatrical potential a sales agent is key. For a film that may find it tougher in the American marketplace, such as many of the docs in the world competition that may not be competing for deals - any subtitled film has a harder time in this marketplace - for those films I don't know that a sales agent necessarily helps for the kinds of smaller deals that may or may not be offered.

I've spent a great deal of my life doing independent film, and that is partly because the subject matter interests me and partly because that is the basis of the film industry. That's where the film-makers come from, it's where they start and sometimes its where they should have stayed.

This film [ Blue is the Warmest Color] actually is the result of me talking with my producer Vincent [Maraval]. I gave him a bunch of ideas and then Vincent helped guide me and develop this particular film. I enjoy that rapport to have somebody else help guide me in my choices for the next film. The poetic way of looking at it is which project is going to choose me as a director.

The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion.

This January, Kevin Costner will be honored by the Palm Springs International Film Festival for his contribution to film. This gives Costner just two months to make a contribution to film.

I bristle a little when the argument for film gets put into the nostalgia ghetto. Film is still the highest quality and best-looking image capture medium available. I don't think it always will be. The digital image will get better, and it will eventually surpass the quality of the film image, but it isn't there yet.

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 motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes ... No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes.

To spend any time with someone who is among the top five film composers of the last 50 years is pure gold dust. I mean, not necessarily stylistically, because everyone is different in what their music sounds like, but the approach and how to look at a film, how to think about a film, how to decide what you want to do, how to think about characters, how to think about art, how to think about narrative, how to liaise with producers, how to liaise with directors.

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.

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.

I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste.

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.

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.

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.

When you go into a movie and you're surprised by it - these days with brand recognition being such an important thing and essentially trailers, the way trailers have evolved encouraging people not to see the film unless they've already seen the film which is kind of the paradox of marketing these days anytime that you enjoy genuine sense of wonder and surprise in the movies it's priceless.

Vertigo is probably my favourite Hitchcock film and probably one of my favourite films of all time. It's a film that I'm obsessed with. I saw it on its first release in vista vision, projected in vista-vision, at the Capitol Theatre in New York. That moment when the nun comes up in the end... it's just an extraordinary shot.

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'm so happy and relieved for the indie spirited film world because ... I don't even know if it's indie, it's just alternative cinema that's just different than what the studios are doing and it's a big variety in that category. Everyone always is complaining about the film industry but I think it's important to acknowledge when it's actually a pretty good time when that comes back around. I'd be remiss not to say, "Hey, it's a pretty good era right now for these reasons," and maybe that doesn't last or maybe it does, but I will acknowledge it.

I make films that are very personal, and I always have. It's kind of the only thing that I think I have to offer as a filmmaker: the intimacy I've had with experience in a particular world, so the film comes from things I've seen and things I've felt. It gets transformed by the process. I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

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.

Different directors have different techniques in the use of films. Cronenberg is very different in the way he works with film, and how he takes the audience into his films is different than how Peter Jackson would do that or Jon Stewart. So, if you go between those artists, you shift gears and you kind of fall into the working method of that film.

Well it's always been an element of the horror film to show us the gross out. I mean that's one option for all filmmakers making a horror film and it's not something I've found myself above either.

There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him.

I've done a lot of independent film, which are short shoots that are usually four to six weeks, max. I enjoy everything. After one particular experience of work, I like to go in the opposite direction and do a short film, or something else.

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.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness.

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.

If Richard Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the 'Great Art Form' would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.

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.

The film [Close Up] made itself, to a large extent. The characters involved were very real, I wasn't directing the actors so much as being directed by them. So it was a very particular film.

I want to have a great director, and also a great producer and co-stars. And there should be a tight script. After all, regardless of how the film turns out, I must have fun doing the film!

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

From film to film, even documentaries, I was learning the medium and learning how to bring form into some kind of relationship with the content, how to work it, and above all, how to create some kind of order out of chaos.

Filmmakers need to give the audience that something extra, an incentive to spend money and go to the multiplex - the ticket prices are high. Otherwise they'd just stay home, buy DVDs or download movies. But if there were only big budget movies it would be impossible for the film industry to survive. So I emphasize the importance of mid-range films. But those films need the support of theatre owners. The theatre chains have to have the vision to realize the need to support smaller films for the growth of the domestic film industry.

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

The normal cut in a theatrical film is anywhere from 3 to 6 seconds. That means thousands of images in a film over a couple of hours. In Visitors the cuts come every 70-plus seconds. The point of view is that the stiller one can be the more open to their senses they become. The whole world is quick right now. If things can be slowed down they stay in memory longer.

If we didn't want to upset anyone, we would make films about sewing, but even that could be dangerous. But I think finally, in a film, it is how the balance is and the feelings are. But I think there has to be those contrasts and strong things within a film for the total experience.

I just want to be with great teachers. If that means I'm in a horror film with good teachers, I'll do another horror film. But I would love to branch out and do more comedy or just more straight dramas.