Quotes About Cinema

Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there still and meditative in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen. One should go to the cinema with the innocence of a fetus

I'm just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it's far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It's not just an art form; it's actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It's my way of telling a story.

I am often asked at what point in my love affair with films I began to want to be a director or a critic. Truthfully, I don't know. All I know is that I wanted to get closer and closer to films.

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.

Most women's pictures are as boring and as formulaic as men's pictures. In place of a car chase or a battle scene, what you get is an extreme closeup of a woman breaking down.

I love 'Goodfellas' because it's a great movie - it's funny and there is action at perfect points. I just think Martin Scorsese makes everyone look really cool.

All Sam Peckinpah ever did in his movies was show that getting hit on the chin doesn't sound like [makes a small popping noise]. When one grown man hits another grown man in the face, it splatters like an overripe tomato. And it's not fun getting killed. It's bloody and gory and altogether unpleasant. That's all Sam Peckinpah ever did.

Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

'The Third Man,' directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, is, quite simply, one of the finest movies ever made.

I think cinema should provoke thoughts, sure, but using it as I soapbox I think is the wrong place. I never want to be part of something like that, where there's an agenda there that's not about telling a story, where its someone getting on a soapbox and preaching their own beliefs onto somebody.

I can't stop watching black and white movies. I live in a world of Warner Brothers movies and all of that stuff from an older era, and I love them. I still love them. When I look at them, I sometimes think I was born in the wrong time.

There's no wrong way to experience a film.

Our films have to entertain without the viewer being guided to a humdrum set of do's and don't's. At the same time, as a filmmaker, my films should evoke some feelings, some thoughts in their minds. That's the purpose of cinema. It has to be a learning experience without advocating rights or wrongs in a subtle manner.

Doing fight scenes in movies is a lot different than in WWE, but it was still relatively easy.

Ratna Pathak Shah played the modern-age mom perfectly well in 'Jaane Tu Ya Jaane na' and 'Khoobsurat.'

I'm not necessarily a huge fan of YA movies. I haven't watched a lot of them.

My roommate at Yale University introduced me to the auteur theory of filmmaking. I soon became a big fan of the works of John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ernst Lubitsch, and Stan Brakhage. I then decided to make my own films!

I want to feel happy doing a good film and don't want to look at cinema with a materialistic yardstick.

Working on a green screen set, yeah, it's almost like reading from a novel, taking those black words and creating a world around you.

Yeah, there's absolutely. I mean, remember when The Searchers came out, it was a relatively big hit for a Western, and I think it made 5 million bucks - I don't even think it made that.

Is it easy for me to write from a female point of view? Yeah, I am a female. I'm a very sensitive type of guy. I try to put my female hat on and think how a female would think. If I'm watching 'The Notebook,' I'm definitely gonna cry. I cried during 'E.T.' too.

So, where's the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?

What's so great about Sundance is that they only accept such a small handful of films per year for dramatic competition, so you know when you're going to Sundance that you're going to see top-quality projects.