Quotes on Film

I can't think of a more pathetic situation for an actor than to do a film and not connect to it. And I pray to God that I never face that situation.

In film, you have to let go sometimes.

You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.

If you don’t like the films of Samuel Fuller , then you just don’t like cinema.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.

Whatever’s inside making me what I am, it’s like film. Film only works in the dark. Tear it all open and let in the light and you kill it.

When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film.

Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders.

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.

I think black people have to be in control of their own image because film is a powerful medium. We can't just sit back and let other people define our existence.

When a filmmaker does not make films it is as if he is jailed. Even when he is freed from the small jail, he finds himself wandering in a larger jail. The main question is: Why should it be a crime to make a movie? A finished film, well, it can get banned but not the director.

If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it.

During the last decades, films about the black experience have been produced, directed, and even scripted by white men. Some of them are excellent. But most reflect George Bernard Shaw’s warning that 'if you do not tell your stories others will tell them for you and they will vulgarize and degrade you.'

The main thing is, you just want to have your place in history. You hope that people will look back on it in 15, 20, 30 and beyond years, and say, "That was an exciting film."

You know... that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at... _x000D_ The wall of a museum - a canvas - a piece of film - or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something - that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you.

The film is made in the editing room.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.

My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat or in film's case 'run on' manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.