Quotes About Film

When I'm writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that's completely self-serving. With film, it's like, the camera can't really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent.

I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.

If you don't generate tension in the film to begin with... you can't really make a purse out of a sow's ear, you know.

I've been on sets where things weren't relaxed because someone was creating tension for no reason.

'Phantom' follows some of the best submarine cold-war films made. There's just so much tension, I can't even describe it - you have to see it.

I know from my experience in theater that the crowd is different every night; the reactions, the tension. But it's true for film as well, going from country to country and culture to culture. The difference between California and New York responses, for example. It's really fascinating.

Even after nine flops, an actor will get his tenth film. But, if a director gives a flop after nine hits, he will not get another film. That is the way the industry functions.

When you're struggling to get a feature film off the ground, there's no big overarching tenure plan or anything like that.

I hate the term 'Bollywood,' because we're not a 'me too' of Hollywood. The Indian film industry is prolific.

Although 'The Anderson Platoon' was what we would now call an 'embedded film' - with all the ambiguities that term implies - somehow Schoendoerffer got away with showing things as they really were from a grunt's perspective.

I hate the term 'rom-com.'

I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio.

'Black film,' that term allows studios to just marginalize a movie and say, 'We've made our black film. We've made our film with people of color in it,' as opposed to, 'I just feel like people of color should be in every genre.'

Actors are the flowers of the film, of the set, and of the director. The term 'Flowers of the Screen' holds a deep meaning.

'Short Term 12' was such a marathon. It's like trying to convey the same emotional depth as 'The Gambler' but with less time and a fingernail's worth of the budget.

I think we are at the very beginning of high changes, not only in terms of digital film, but in the way the movies will be screened, whether they'll be screened on phones, on computers - on everything.

You never really know as an actor; it's completely out of your control, in terms of editing, and music, and film stock, shot selection, and what takes they use.

I think content-driven cinema is appealing in terms of even money-making.

In terms of digital photography, I continue to print and use film for the most part. I still shoot with film, 21/4 film specifically, and I love it. I love it because I know what it does, how it really responds to light.

My mother didn't let me see color films. I saw a lot of black-and-white films. The first time I saw Basil Rathbone, I was completely taken. To me, that was the epitome of great acting, was Basil Rathbone - not only in Sherlock Holmes, but the Sheriff of Nottingham, and all the terrible characters he had to play alongside Errol Flynn.

I had a terrible motorcycle accident, in San Francisco as matter of fact. Doing a picture called... oh, this is terrible. It's a very well-known film and I can't remember the name. That's what happens when you get older... I fell off a bridge in San Francisco and was laid up for two years.

It's easy to show terrible people's behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, 'Isn't that terrible.' It's more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good.

He asked me whether I had seen the movie 'The Color Purple.' I said no she hadn't. And Bobby said, 'Well, it's a terrible picture. They don't make good, decent, moral pictures nowadays.'

I think everyone goes through chapters in their life and there was a time when I wasn't feeling terribly positive about what I was contributing to film, or wasn't feeling as if I was going in the direction I wanted and I re-evaluated what I was doing.