Quotes About Cinema

No one needs yet another recipe book on how to reheat Hollywood leftovers. We need a rediscovery of the underlying tenets of our art, the guiding principles that liberate talent. No matter where a film is made—Hollywood, Paris, Hong Kong—if it's of archetypal quality, it triggers a global and perpetual chain reaction of pleasure that carries it from cinema to cinema, generation to generation.

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.

It's hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

Orson Welles] was a man who made the greatest film ever made and was never forgiven for it.

When a movie character is really working, we become that character. That's what the movies offer: escapism into lives other than our own.

Siskel's Saw. It's amazing how many movies are not as interesting as a documentary of the same actors sitting around talking over lunch. GENE SISKEL

Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's basilica.

which plays like porn dubbed by bitter deconstructionist theoreticians.

True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema.

Abbott and Costello are surrounded—by Bela Lugosi and Glenn Strange—in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.

I believe that cinema picks up ideas from society and not the other way round.

Cinema explains American society. It's like a Western, with good guys and bad guys, where the weak don't have a place.

For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society.

If you say one gets influenced watching a character, I think its foolish. Cinema reflects society; society rarely reflects cinema.

Não há nada de mais imoral do que roubar sem riscos. É o risco que nos diferencia dos banqueiros e dos seus émulos que praticam o roubo legalizado com a cobertura do governo. Não te inculquei a minha arte para te tornares um ladrão de cinema cuja única preocupação é não desagradar ao seu público.

Aldous Huxley absolutely detested mass culture and popular entertainment, and many of his toughest critical essays, as well as several intense passages in his fiction, consist of sneers and jeers at the cheapness of the cinematic ethic and the vulgarity of commercial music.

IBM was the original contractor for much of the computer interface design on the film.

I didn't have a normal academic career. I never studied cinema. I learned from life.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

Cinema never saved anyone's life, it is not a medicine that will save anyone's life. It is only an aspirin.

I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something's been confirmed for them about life.

I don't think that my films are 'literary'; they are based on the most ordinary things of life.

How can a motion picture reflect real life when it is made by people who are living artificial lives?