Quotes About Movies

I love movies; I grew up loving movies. I've always loved movies. I never thought about making movies until I took art classes and then I started studying different artists. As you study paintings, you see light and shadow, of course - Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix. You start to understand the relationship between people and art, and images. For me, between movies that I watched and art, it was like, I'd love to make moving art. Moving pictures.

I try to find inspiration in books, paintings, illustrations and the one thing I try to avoid is just being inspired by other movies, because then you just are talking about movies in movies. I try to talk about movies that are culturally and spiritually a little more diverse.

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like.

I think there are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. We romanticize everything about people in movies. One of the things I don't like in movies is that people feel alone with their bodily functions in the real world, as if people in the movies don't do these things.

I can't do the same movies all my life. I'm conscious of that. But it's a trade-off. 'Dear John' allowed me to do movies I've wanted to do. You learn to balance it out. I'm still learning. Only now am I getting to do the kinds of movies that I have wanted to do. So it's a steady climb. You don't jump into a Soderbergh film.

I made a body of work, which was like trying to make movies on a wall and was made up of all different images and materials. I had the aspiration to make movies because I thought that was the cycle. I had this insane egomaniac idea that I could make movies because I made these gigantic art projects.

I do really like doing animated movies. I like watching animated movies, and I always have. That's something I didn't let go of, from when I was a kid. It's always exciting for me to get to do that. Animated movies are so rarely bad.

I love movies to death. I spent my entire youth in front of a TV watching old movies and as soon as I was able to get a subway pass when I was 14 I joined the Museum of Modern Art and was there all weekend watching old movies.

When you make movies, I find that I never have time to go to the movies and enjoy movies like I used to, because I'm so movied out, right, I'm so filmed out that the last thing that I wanna do is with the little spare time that I have is stick in a dark room and watch more stuff on the screen.

Personally I like the slow burn; I don't think there is anything wrong with it. When I think about the movies that were most effective on me as a viewer I think of the original Haunting and the Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, the Sixth Sense, the Others. These movies are not over the top at all, they are movies that rely on good story telling, good acting, good premise, good exposition and I want to stay true to that in future projects.

In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.

But strangely, [in] the original Matt Helm books, he's just this super hardass assassin. They sort of made it into a sexy romp for the movies. The books are very, very dark. I also watched 'OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies,' which is a French film. They just made a second one, I think, which is based on like, 100 novels. They're just fantastic. They're set in the '60s. A lot of the visual inspiration definitely came from 1960 James Bond movies and 'OSS 177' and also 'Pink Panther' movies.

If you deconstruct the movies that have done well, Pixar-type movies that do incredibly well and make hundreds of millions of dollars, they have a strain of decency and conservatism that maybe even their filmmakers don't even recognize. Yet, we cross our fingers that by mistake, liberal filmmakers and liberal producers are going to by mistake make conservative movies. We have to become invested in it, or else we have no excuse to complain.

When I was a kid I was a big fan of the Universal Monsters movies of the 1930's and the 1940's. I loved movies like The Wolfman (1941) and Dracula (1931). I really wanted to be in those movies. Eventually I started nagging my parents about it, and it turned from, "I wanna be in a monster movie! I wanna be in a monster movie!" to "I just wanna be in a movie." So I think my parents just thought that if they took me to one audition I'd see how boring it was and I wouldn't wanna do it. But I ended up getting the part, and I got a bunch of roles after that as well.

I like movies. Movies have afforded me a modicum of luxuries. The thing about the movies is, if you're bad in a movie, you're bad forever.

The Czech movies, the quality movies, are trying to show the life in the country as it is, in an entertaining way, while in America, the majority of movies are wonderful fairy tales.

Movies are not the book. Movies are not even the screenplay. They are the movie.

I don't make movies about issues. This is my same litmus test for all the movies I love: Is it a great character on a great emotional quest with a great emotional need? Do they overcome great emotional obstacles? Is it a fantastic story? I didn't set out to be a political activist. I'm just a human being who's moved by certain things, and if certain things break my heart, I set out to fix them.

I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.

Unfortunately, 'chick flick' has become a term to describe most movies that I don't even like. They're these movies that, yes, have women in them but they really don't reflect who women are, and there's something kind of silly or shallow or gossipy about them.

You want to know about a certain period and what happened?-You go into this building and all of a sudden you are transported! You're not just shown pictures, not even 3-D pictures, not even movies, but suddenly you are transported live by a time machine to that very time, that very age and you see it happen, you watch it happen, you hear it happen, you feel it happen! Think of it! Not only the movies but the 'feelies'! You are there!

Ever since 'Lassie' and 'Old Yeller', I won't watch animal movies. Animals in movies always die.

I like to play guitar, jam out, play the blues, go watch movies. I love movies.

I describe television as feminine and movies as masculine, in the sense that television wants to examine a problem from all sides and talk about it for a long time, and movies just want to hit the climax and then maybe have a smoke.

My father is so in love with making movies, and he'sso charismatic about it, that it's hard to be around him withoutwanting to make movies.

We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands.

Movies serve many purposes, and I've visited many of those genres, from the most light, frivolous comedy that is just trying to make you laugh, to movies that explore the most complicated side of the human soul. As an actor, I play all of those things, and I still like it.

We're living in a time where movies are very unimportant. They're not leaving a footprint on your heart. We're going to the movies now and we're going, "Oh, man, that was cool! That was thrilling! That was a ride!" But, we're not walking away anymore thinking, "I just experienced something that could change the way I live."

In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.

I am a fan of movies and there is something about watching film that is burned into celluloid for all time that is now a piece of history. You go watch, being a fan of classic films and my children and their children are going to be watching these movies.

I just like movies, not one particular kind or genre. In fact, movies that are harder to classify I like more.

There’s something strange about theater. My characters consistently demonize elitism, but of course it’s taking place in a theater where only so many people can see it. I’ve been in silly popcorn movies - the kind of thing that as an actor you might feel embarrassed about - but those movies reach many more people.

I look at movies, unfortunately, and I still see a lot of movies [lacking diversity].

I often envy a filmmaker or a playwright or an author where people are like, "Yeah, I sat down every night and read your book and it was beautiful." Or, "Yeah, I went to the movies and all I did was watch the movie because that's all you could do at the movies." Where with music, it's like, "Ugh, I love your music. I listen to it while I'm jogging thinking about how I hate my body." But it is also the privilege of being a musician is you can have your music in this documented form and play it live and that's, I think, what draws me to it the most.

I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.

A huge problem in movies or with people who work on movies is that two people can look at the same thing but they don't necessarily see the same thing.

We don't do movies for the industry. We do movies for the fans, for the people. If the industry give you a trophy or not, or pat you on the back or not, it's nice, but it's not something you should dwell on.

The movies that are honored at The Oscars are always a certain type: Old-fashioned. It's a bunch of well-made, old-fashioned movies that support our idea of ourselves. They uplift the human spirit. That's why horror films never even get nominated.

I made a few movies in Holland for a lot of TV series. I came to Los Angeles and for the last 10 years, I made a lot of feature films - all kinds of low budget action movies for the studios.

Singin' in the Rain was most excellent if you like movies where people burst into song and tap-dance. Which I do, though not as much as I like movies where people don't.

Actually, I went from doing a lot of movies early on in my career, then to doing TV, and I don't know whether we'll get back to some movies or not.

A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.

After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best movies in the world.

I do believe that people go to the movies - for one reason or another - they go to the movies to have an experience.

We just don't want to repeat anything that we've done in the movies [X-man] or that we're going to do in the movies. There's so many stories to tell, we just want to stay out of each other's way.

I like movies about people and movies with characters; that's what I'm drawn to as a person who likes to create these characters within the story, but I like it all, really.

I like to make movies the way people made movies in the '70s, where they lived and died with these stories, and cared about them, and went to war for them, and they all said something they wanted to say.

We have not looked at any particular movies [in creating War Horse], but again, it's hard not to see the similarities between those movies [because of those filmmakers' influence on the industry].