Film Quotes

I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.

My job is to portray real human beings and real human experiences, and if I haven't had a real human experience myself outside of the film industry, how am I going to be able to do that?

I'd rather make an interesting film that gets people talking, that maybe some people hate, than make the kind of 'entertaining' film that everyone feels ambivalent about.

I was really disappointed that Warner Bros. didn't think highly enough of my film or my filmmaking to ask me to make the new Superman.

In that film Love Story, there's a line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you're sorry every day for some little thing or other.

The least consideration of any film I've ever worked on is who is right for it.

A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true.

I love films where the world seems to be going a bit faster and everything's a bit brighter and more in focus.

You are not an active creator of the film.

The films dramatic requirements should always take precedence over the mere aesthetics of editing.

I never enjoyed working in a film.

I think English film is very embarrassed by patriotism, generally.

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

What I remember myself from films, and what I love about films, is specific scenes and characters.

I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

The mole is an animal that digs passages searching for the sun. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he looks at the sun he goes blind.

Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by the simplest of such injunctions.

One thing I know is that I don't want to be a director for hire, making genre films.

As I'm getting older, I want to make sure every film I do really counts.

When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience.

To make a film, the final big collaborator that you have is the composer.

Ninety percent of films are pretty mediocre, but they have a built-in audience and open on 3,000 screens.

When I got back into the film business after college, I started out as a production assistant.

I'm really proud of Blair Witch Project as a film, but as far as the cultural phenomenon of it - that was just weird luck.

I don't have any sort of calculus in choosing film roles.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

By drawing or exposing two or more patterns on the same bit of film I can create harmony and textual effects.

If you make a film normally it's all right, the distributors are helpful and cooperative. But if you make a film that's a little stange, a little bizarre, then all the time it's a struggle with them.

I can tell when an actor's forcing tears, and it's tricky because you then have to film it and edit in a certain way to skirt around the issue.

When I see a film I've finished, it's like another person made it. Like another mind.

Other actors like to rehearse on film-they like 30 or 40 takes. When you get an actor like that, it becomes difficult for me because I'm ready to quit after number two.

A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.

I don't know what to do with myself between films. I end up doing unhealthy things like shopping or drinking. I'm pretty schizophrenic about it.

Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.

I feel Irish-Americans are the forgotten minority group. Nobody else is making films about them.

But in fact if you look at film as a metaphor, only through the negative can you have the positive print. What I'm trying to get to is the positive value of negation.

Absolutely, 'Rabbit Hole' gave me a nice first introduction into film acting.

A film is the director's medium. The theater is an actor's.

One of the most telling things about film school is you've got a lot of students wandering around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a movie."

Kurosawa was one of film's true greats. His ability to transform a vision into a powerful work of art is unparalleled.

Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?

But I think Barry Sonnenfeld let his ego go out of control. He told me in a meeting that he had to do something to make it his film.

I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I've seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.

I don't want to make pompous, serious films.

I like black and white films. I don't exactly know why - probably because there is a stylization which is removed from actual life, unlike a color film.

When I made 'Hard Boiled,' I had no idea that it would be released to an international audience. I just wanted to make a film to team up my two favorite actors, Tony Leung and Chow Yun-Fat.