Quotes About Cinema

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

I first visited the Toronto fest in 1979, its fourth edition, when it was known as the Festival of Festivals and had an audience of about 40,000. I happily returned to the 10-day skein nearly every year thereafter, as attendance swelled to 400,000 and it grew into the most influential film festival in North America, perhaps the world.

There is no physical activity. All entertainment is happening in phone. Films can also be seen in laptop, so no one is visiting cinema halls.

I guess, in a sense, 'Audition' was a film that gave me an opportunity that I hadn't had up until that point. So that's definitely one that is important to me. Then there's 'Visitor Q' that kind of taught me that there are some kinds of films that can only be made as low-budget films that really wouldn't work as anything else.

For me and my films, I want my audience to experience cinema in its full glory. It's not just visual, it's audio as well. It's emotional, and I want you to be engaged with not just the scene but with the characters.

'Piku' was driven by subtleties. Most films come with the padding of the sound, the visual, the drama.

I don't think so much about verbal comedy. I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I'm always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking - although I want good talking. I'm much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth.

Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.

I am a film director, and I work with a visual language, with a visual medium. And I try to make virtue of the use of this visual medium. And I try to make sure what I do speaks the language of cinema.

Cinema is a visual language, and you're always looking for visual metaphors for things. You know, if I was writing a play about Howard Hughes, I could have him give a monologue about how he's terrified to touch a doorknob. But on screen, you know, working with Marty Scorsese in 'The Aviator,' that became the series of images that told a story.

I look at scripts, and sometimes I apply theory to them. For 'Antiviral,' for example, I was reading Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' and it was all about the psychological process by which we fetishize the female image. It's all about scopophilia.

When we think about a great movie, I mean, what do we think about? We think about story, we think about character. And when the visual effects aren't perfect, we forgive it.

For 8,000 years, we've had lyric poetry; for 400 years we've had the novel: theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let's find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.

There are people who've told me cinema is a visual medium and you don't need to say so much. When I write the script, all these lines of what the characters are thinking are written. Once the film is shot and the lines are dubbed, I tone it down in postproduction if I feel it gets heavy.

I just love films and any time you get to see a film with a good story, no matter how much money you have for visual effects, if the story isn't good it won't be a good film.

You have to realize I like doing big movies that appear on a big screen. So the visuals and the audio have to be of a certain quality before I start to get excited about the thing.

A lot of the films now are more focused on the visuals than on the actors. I think all directors should go to drama school.

What I am really curious about is the visuals of cinema... the form.

I've always said if I had to pinpoint what's more important in a scary movie, the soundscape or the visuals, I'd pick the sound.

Cinema is a visual medium one has to communicate through visuals, and therefore, dialogues should be less.

Cinema is ultimately a work of art, it is all about sound and visuals.

My cinema is an extension of myself. A sort of life-testimony of my vital experience, with my few virtues and my numerous limitations.

'Up the Junction' really made me understand the power of cinema to create a vivid sense of a community. When I went on to make 'Bhaji on the Beach,' it was this sense I tried to recreate.

A lot of people who make films in my generation have the vocabulary of all the films they've seen before.