Quotes on Film

There are some directors who actually fear the possible success of music. They fear that the audience or the critics will think the film has worked because there was a very good music score.

I've always been drawn to stories and telling them; whether it was through being a part of theater when I was a little kid, or film, or with music, there's just been an innate desire to feel that connection.

There is a lot of extreme emotion in Korean film. It's because there are a lot of extremes in Korean society.

No matter where I am working, I cannot make a film without 100% creative control and final cut. If there is such a guarantee, I can work anywhere.

Film is an editor's medium. You can create very good raw material and they can make it horrible, or you can do not so well and they can make it beautiful. You don't really know.

I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it's equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people.

When you're in a movie with an audience, you can feel where a film is dragging. People start to move. They fidget. You need that perspective. To give it a cold eye.

I don't choose to make low-budget films. But that is the reality of surviving in the Japanese film industry. However, the trade off is, since we're working on small budgets, we have freedom. You can't buy this freedom with money. With this freedom, I think there are an infinite number of possibilities.

I've been on a lot of film sets, and I've always promised myself I wouldn't create a set where people dread coming to work.

I always aspire to that, where it feels like the film was made by the characters as opposed to the filmmakers. I try to be invisible.

Choosing location is integral to the film: in essence, another character.

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

Trying to make a feature film yourself with no money is the best film school you can do.

For me, utter failure is to make a film that people pay their money to go see and they don't like.

Film is an emotional medium; it's not a logical medium. It's not an intellectual medium, so every decision you make as a filmmaker and an actor has to be emotional in some way, even in the rejection of logic.

I have friends who I consider my peers, who have done amazing work, particularly in the film and television space, who came up as independent artists and who have been - to be brutally honest - much more prolific than I was able to be.

Cinema is a little over 100 years old, and a lot of what we do is built around film emulsion. Those things were calibrated for white skin. We've always placed powder on skin to dull the light. But my memory of growing up in Miami is this moist, beautiful black skin.

All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it's a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.

Film is a mirror. I want to see more filmmakers. We all want to see ourselves.

I didn't really know how to make a film when I made 'Control'. I had to create my own language, just as I did when I started taking photographs. I never studied either one.

Everything that was interesting was outside of Poland. Great music, art, film, hippies, Mick Jagger. It was impossible even to dream of escape. I was convinced as a teen-ager that I would have to spend the rest of my life in this trap.