Quotes About Film

Whenever I did a good performance, my Dad and my uncles, who were rabid movie fans, took me to the movies. There began my underlying love affair with film.

I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin, and it's the funniest, most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.

It's amazing how much you can absorb on a film set.

For behaviorist films, that's been much more useful - the change of technology - but for my kind of films, doing them on film is much better, because it's more beautiful.

January is the garbage can of movies in America, directly after all the Oscar contenders have been out.

I really don't have favorites I'm just a fan of movies, period.

On 14 March the Czech President, Hacha, was summoned to Berlin. He was kept waiting while Hitler watched a film. At last, in the early hours of the morning, Hacha was marched into the room and told that in a few hours' time the Wehrmacht was going to invade his country.

I have two dream roles: One would be a biopic of someone I admire and respect and the other one would be some sort of action drama film similar to a 'Bourne Identity.' I just really want to do an intelligent action drama film.

Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.

I love actors, both my parents were actors, and the work with actors is the most enjoyable part of making a film. It's important that they feel protected and are confident they won't be betrayed. When you create that atmosphere of trust, it's in the bag - the actors will do everything to satisfy you.

Levels of information were levels of dread, once it's out it won't go back in, you can't just blink it away or run the film backward out of consciousness. How many of those levels did you really want to hump yourself through, which plateau would you reach before you shorted out and started sending the messages back unopened?

We see death constantly on film.

Film, for me, has been a process of learning on the job.

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.

When we say a character in my films doesn't function, we mean he doesn't function as a person, but he does function as a character that is, until you take him as a symbol. At that point it is you who are not functioning. Why not simply accept him as a character, without judging him? Accept him for what he is. Accept him as a character in a story, without claiming that he derives or acquires meaning from that story. There may be meanings, but they are different for all of us.

The light, now down to its grotty underwear, was cinematically sad.

There's always an imbalance with actors and actresses in the industry. And I think because there are just fewer movies overall being made, it's that trickle down effect.

After the Code, crime films, adventures, gangster films, war movies, and comedies all continued to get produced, with some adjustments. But the social dramas that took a woman's point of view, that remained on the woman's side from start to finish, requiring of her no last-minute conversion, apology, or reversion to happy subservience, all but disappeared. One can infer the intent of censorship by seeing what exactly got censored.

Suffering is not bad: It helps you very much. Do you know a novel about happiness? Or a film about happy people? We are a perverse race, only suffering interests us.

The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

I think I make films to help bolster and feed the part of me that wants to remain in a positive relationship with the world and to engage in it. So hopefully in non-sentimental ways, I'm trying to make something that helps make me happy.

It's funny now how much we look at - whatever you want to call it: art, design, culture stuff, film - online, and how in the online world, you're instantly global.