Quotes About Cinema

It's wonderful to do these great blockbusters and bigger pictures, but my heart is always with true stories.

When you tell a film financier that you want to do a Shakespeare film, their face drops. Shakespeare films don't have a very wonderful history at the box office.

Television is what made It's a Wonderful Life the classic it is today.

The wonderful thing about cinema is you can bring a 3D world to life.

As the 1960s began, a new breed of Hollywood leading lady was emerging. She was elegant, international, and wonderfully comedic.

I think all the filmmakers in Hong Kong are influenced by John Woo.

I'm a big John Woo fan.

Look at 'Marienbad' honestly. What is it? It is just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork.

I'm a great fan of Woody Allen's movies.

I love 'Manhattan', and I know it's not one of Woody's favorites.

I grew up watching his movies; I know everyone did, but I really feel that a lot of my formative years were informed by Woody Allen films.

I like so many different directors: Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Gus van Sant, Woody Allen and the greats like Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky and among current filmmakers von Trier, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai.

I wanted to work with Mike Leigh. I had my list of British people I wanted to work with, and I wanted to work with David Lynch and Woody Allen.

Being in a Woody Allen film. I cherish it.

The reality is, the movies that were most impactful to me growing up, when I decided I wanted to make movies, I was going to see Woody Allen double features with my brother, back when they had double features.

I would like to work with people whose films I really like: Walter Salles, Woody Allen, Julio Medem.

'Independent' means one thing to me: It means that regardless of the source of financing, the director's voice is extremely present. It's such a pretentious term, but it's auteurist cinema. Director-driven, personal, auteurist... Whatever word you want.

I'm hoping that word-of-mouth on the film - people seeing it and liking it - that that will drive more people to the theaters, because I haven't seen the billboards or the posters or anything.

Every director has his own syntax, his own grammar, his own words.

Good directors don't answer questions with their work. They generate debate and create discussion.

I never got in this business, in cinema, to make horror movies. They arrived on my doorstep and I got typecast. Which was fine, I enjoy it, but I got into this business to make westerns. And the kind of westerns I used to see, they died. So that didn't work out.

Every movie that I do, if you analyze the stories, you can notice that in each story, that within the movie after the first 15 minutes, it could fall apart. Or every 10 minutes it has the chance that you lose the thread. On the other hand, if you succeed in putting them together, then the movie looks spontaneous and more like cinema.

Always, European art cinema has been the most threatening and the grimmest and the most transgressive, I think.

I really like 'The Three Kings' DVD. I love that movie and all the extra footage and documentaries.