Quotes About Film

'The Tin Drum' is one of my favourite books of all time - I've probably got 12 or 15 copies with different covers, different translations - but it's also just about my favourite film.

'Lost in Translation' was a year of my life, if not more, and then 'Marie Antoinette' was about three years of my life.

I took all my TV experience and what I learned about - by writing and directing and bringing a movie to Sundance - about the realities of the independent film market: 'Transparent' is the marriage of those two situations.

Stuntwork... once, I've really only done one thing, which is take a punch and transport myself into the air onto a mat.

Watching great performances can transport us, and finding a film that really moves you is a galvanising and inspiring thing.

The sets of 'Lootera' itself transport you to the 15th century, since everything was designed according to that era.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.

Any film I do is not going to change the way black women have been portrayed, or black people have been portrayed, in cinema since the days of D.W. Griffith.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.

In the early 1950s the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tried something old. Like many another venue for productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw, the Brattle had become a film house in the early 1950s. But it was a film house unlike any other. It had a rear-screen projector, rather than the standard setup that beamed movies on a screen above the audience. And it had owners who believed that the past could be more alluring than the present.

Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.

The lies are in the dialogue, the truth is in the visuals.

I think one of the major things a director has to do is to know his subject matter, the subject matter of his script, know the truth and the reality of it. That's very important.

My acting stopped being about disguise and became about truth which suits the camera, so my film career took off when I came out.

Everyone has this conjecture that action films are somewhat less prestigious than dramatic films. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've done them both and this is hard and dangerous.

Cinema verité is not the film of truth, but the truth of film.

Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.

...truth-telling may be an ethic, adopted by photojournalists as a behavior, but experience shows us that it is not embedded in the medium like silver salts in film.

My job is to create a film, where we are capturing truth in performances.

A film is not a documentary. And what's wonderful about film is that it's a real provocation for people. I never, ever see film as being an absolute version of the truth.

The truth for me is that I've been doing independent film since the get-go, so that's a big passion of mine, but the big ones are really fun, too. I like my world to be eclectic.