Quotes About Film

'The Room' has never interested me as a film. The reaction interested me.

The cutest part is that both my grandparents have tried to adapt to my dream. When I sat them down and showed them a film that I did - with an intimate scene in it - I was surprised that their reaction wasn't dramatic. My grandmother even came to me to ask, 'How do you do it?'

We don't set out to be polarizing. But just by the nature of what we've always done, it seems to have a certain polarizing aspect, so it kind of seemed almost natural that a film that we would be involved in would have that same kind of reaction.

I'm so happy that the first time Russell and I saw 'Annette' with an audience was at the Cannes Film Festival, and even more pleased that it got such a strong positive reaction because that's pretty much the top honor when it comes to screening a film.

When I make a film, the mixing process is very long, and you hear and watch the material in every form, so that totally shreds your ability to perceive it. So after the mixing, there's no way I can have the emotions or the reactions to my films in the same way.

I had started off, before I ever got an acting job, working at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions as a reader. I was always interested in that side of the camera.

Personally, I'm a big reader, and I've never wanted any of my favorite novels to be made into movies.

I adore book-to-film adaptations when they're done well, and I'm more lenient than many readers when it comes to what counts as 'done well.' For me, the most important thing is that the film maintains the spirit of the original book.

It is much easier to do a film about something that the audience readily knows about - say, cricket. It is much more difficult to write a film based on golf.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

Whenever I hear the narration for a new film, I have this process back home where my mother reads all my scripts.

My criteria has always been the script, director and character. But I also attach importance to the production house. After all, the banner has to go all out to present the film in a grand manner. I am ready to work with any house that is capable of marketing and packaging a film well.

I think a first-time director always has to convince a lot of people that they're ready to do it.

I'm not quite ready for a no makeup movie.

Compare with a country like China, India has very few cinema screens, as we have real estate problems.

Shooting a movie should be fun! It's not a real job. It can be hard, but at the end of the day, we're dressing up and playing pretend.

Through film, I realized that was a safe place for me to play. It was a safe place for me to express myself and explore these things that I was afraid to explore in my real life.

There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.

Audiences make their minds up about people they see on screen, just like they do in real life. That's what fascinates me in film. You see a character and have to think: is this person different to what I assumed he was when I first saw him?

I'm very comfortable with an R-rating. I feel like it sounds like what people talk like in real life; I think it's more real to me.

You are always invested in a film, but there is always a different feeling you get when you are portraying a character that is based on real life and you are re-telling events that actually took place.

Culture is this thing that exists apart from our real life but is something we all have tacitly agreed to in America. And what film and television do, particularly in this country, is lay out the characters involved in this invisible agreement and dictate who and what can participate.

I like working in TV, but my real love is making movies.

My goal would be to make Frank Capra-type films about real people, how they define their reality.