Quotes About Film

In motion pictures, the actor rules. The camera served the actor.

I enjoy doing my more intimate and less commercial pictures and also I enjoy directing.

I really like sometimes to do action pictures; I get a really big kick out of doing those.

I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.

If you remain open to great directors who look like you, who know what they're doing and are making impactful films that are destroying these 'blockbuster films,' you can do okay, and everybody can get more of a piece of the pie. But you've got to be open and brave.

'Midnight Cowboy' is an exquisite piece of filmmaking. It's insane.

An actor really is a kind of intermediary between an audience and the piece, whether it's a play or movie.

I'd like to do a piece of Shakespeare. Any upcoming Shakespeare film. Just a bit to say I did a classic.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

Id like to do an action film or a dark sort of independent piece.

Doing a piece on film is completely different from doing it onstage.

First, you do a piece of material that begins and ends and has a flow; it's not chopped up as in a film, where in an extreme case you might be doing the last scene of the script the first day that you go to work, and you don't know enough about the character you're playing.

I've got one idea I want to do for a film and you know I just enjoy myself doing bits and pieces.

Everybody who worked in film misses holding pieces of film, holding it up to the light, and seeing exactly where something was image-wise.

Simple stories... emerge as lovely films or television pieces.

Fortunately, both television adaptations and the film I've been involved with are pieces of work that I'm proud of, so I'm very happy for people to focus on them.

I don't know why I get cast in a lot of period pieces. Stephen Fry told me that I had a face for period, that I look like someone from 1920.

I have a lot of things I want to do. I have a lot of fire. I want to do film. I want to do action movies. I want to do period pieces.

A lot of period pieces we see are adaptations of novels - we always know the story.

'Five Easy Pieces,' 'Easy Rider' - those are indie pictures; those were not studio pictures. They had relationships with studio distribution, but they were indies.

I had come from an orchestral background, but I didn't really have any orchestral pieces for film.

When I first heard 'A Christmas Story, the musical,' I thought, Oh, that could be really good. It just felt like it fit. Some films lend themselves well to other formats, some don't, but there are so many fantasy sequences in the film, and Ralphie's such a dreamer as a character, I thought they could really lend themselves to being set pieces.

What happens a lot in film, though not so much in the theatre, is that you get stroked and sort of massaged, like a little guinea pig.

It was no accident that I made 'Hoop Dreams' because it concerned a sport that I loved and hoped would be my dream, however far-fetched that turned out to be. Because of the success of that film, Hollywood pigeonholed me as a sports biopic guy, which led to 'Prefontaine' and two cable sports films.