Quotes on Cinema

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

Cinema has become my life. I dont mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

I'm under the impression that this notion of decency is disappearing from our society where conflicts are made worse on cinema and on television, where people are nasty and cruel on the Internet and where, in general, everybody seems to be very angry.

Is the cinema more important than life?

We are all animals of this planet. We are all creatures. And nonhuman animals experience pain sensations just like we do. They too are strong, intelligent, industrious, mobile, and evolutional. They too are capable of growth and adaptation. Like us, firsthand foremost, they are earthlings. And like us, they are surviving. Like us they also seek their own comfort rather than discomfort. And like us they express degrees of emotion. In short like us, they are alive.

I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.

Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs.

Cinema verité is not the film of truth, but the truth of film.

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.

You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.

As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things - we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.

The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.

Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers - and in people's minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.

Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don’t be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you’ve had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time… maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn’t worth hearing, and I think everyone’s voice is worth hearing. So if you’ve got something to say, say it from the rooftops.

More than an actor, I am a performer... I'm a great believer - honestly so, shamelessly so, vulgarly so - that cinema is for entertainment. If you want to send messages, there's the postal service.

People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.

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 think the first British actor who really worked well in cinema was Albert Finney. He was a back-street Marlon Brando. He brought a great wittiness and power to the screen. The best actor we've had.