Quotes on Film

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

I applaud Women in Film - not only for celebrating the successes of women, but for providing a safety network to mentor women and to discuss the particular issues that arise in a very male-dominated industry.

After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.

It's very fashionable to talk about human trafficking, in this fantastic A-C hall. It's very nice for discussion, discourse, making films and everything. But it is not nice to bring them to our homes. It's not nice to give them employment in our factories, our companies. It's not nice for our children to study with their children. There it ends. That's my biggest challenge.

The reality of the final moment, just before shooting [the scene], is so powerful that all previous analysis must yield before the impressions you receive under these circumstances, and unless you use this feedback to your positive advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to it and accept the sometimes terrifying weaknesses it can expose, you can never realize the most out of your film.

My main point about films is that I don't like the adaptation process, and I particularly don't like the modern way of comic book-film adaptations, where, essentially, the central characters are just franchises that can be worked endlessly to no apparent point.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

You should make something. You should bring something into the world that wasn't in the world before. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter if it's a table or a film or gardening-everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say, 'I did that.'

It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word.

For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. It's cheaper to work on film, it's far better looking, it's the technology that's been known and understood for a hundred years, and it's extremely reliable.

Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate. He called me a 'fat pig' in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have 'the physique of a slave-trader.' He is angry at me because I said his 'The Brown Bunny' was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival... _x000D_ it is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'

Film has to be reflecting the world that we live in, and that's all you want to be a part of. Actors inhabit the same planet as everyone else. It's a weird thing that happens when you're an actor because people hold you up because you somehow embody in parts groups of people or people's hopes or something.

When you are a beginning film maker you are desperate to survive. The most important thing in the end is survival and being able to get to your next picture.

This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion

I know how gratifying it is not only to work in film but to be acknowledged by peers; producing 9 to 5 was an opportunity that I valued precisely because it’s so rarely in the hands of women.

Maybe that's what these films are doing. They are my way of blessing the child

I've lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I'm glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thief.

Digital photography is, by definition, unfinished. You don't feel that after every 24 or 36 shots you have to change your film - you know you can go on for ever if you want. You can see the result immediately, and find out if your original idea is worth going on with or not, whether it can be corrected, whether it can be improved.

Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live for ever and they're 40 ft wide and 20 ft high.

There's an unwritten law that you cannot have a Jewish character in a film who isn't 100 percent perfect, or you're labeled anti-Semitic.