A Quote by Rithy Panh

'The Missing Picture' is about my story and my parents. Before this film, I never said 'I' in a film, so it is very personal. — © Rithy Panh
'The Missing Picture' is about my story and my parents. Before this film, I never said 'I' in a film, so it is very personal.
I did New York, I Love You which is a very personal film for me. My most personal film, but it's not like a film I've ever made. I would never do that film as a feature, for instance, because it's not very commercial of an idea.
My parents knew about the story of Aladdin far before the animation film. It's a folk tale that is very prevalent in Egypt.
When I make film music, I'm a filmmaker first and foremost. It's about serving the needs of the film. You're telling a story; in a way, you stop becoming a composer and become a storyteller instead. You tell the story with the most appropriate themes. How you approach these things is a very personal matter, but your goal is to tell the story first.
With independent film, simply because they don't have the money to make a big-budget film, they're forced to make a story that's important to them, that they would like to see on film, a personal story that people can relate to, about people, where you can see the love of the characters.
I'm very troubled when editors oblige their film critics to read the novel before they see the film. Reading the book right before you see the film will almost certainly ruin the film for you.
I make a film - and once I've made it, everyone comes along and says 'Ah! This is a film that's political, or social', or whatever. But I'm not telling the story that they see. I made a film, told a story, but I wasn't thinking about exactly what it all meant.
I'd never read 'Prince Caspian'. I watched it and loved that film. Everybody was talking about its lack of success; its relative success in comparison to the other film. It's a great film. It deserved to do a lot better than it did. It's very difficult to make a film that will match up to the first.
I was very blessed it was Steven Spielberg who made the movie. He was very much into the redemption side of the story. They asked him in an interview why he had owned the rights to this story for 20 years before he made the movie, and he said, 'I wanted to see what the real Frank Abagnale did with his life before I immortalised him on film.'
When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Ox Bow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross that defines what kind of drama it is.
'Parava,' in my head, was always a film about children. And I was like, 'If I can be part of the film and help promote it in some way or the other, I'd be very happy.' I also did 'Ann Maria' because it was a story about kids.
Honestly, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio.
I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don't have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. I never know where the story will go but I just keeping working on the film as it develops. It's a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, that's the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it.
On another level this film talks about that. We had tremendous freedom while making this film. We never thought about marketing. It wasn't a film made to sell merchandise or products or to reach millions of people around the world. It was a film made to say what I really felt.
I'm excited about how books work in a digital age. When you read a book, unlike a film, you are decoding symbols in order to 'see' the story, so it is collaborative in a way that a film can never be.
Film 'This Changes Everything' is not a sad story. It's not a slit-your-wrists climate film. It's a story about people who are making change happen.
With The Exorcist we said what we wanted to say. Neither one of us view it as a horror film. We view it as a film about the mysteries of faith. It's easier for people to call it a horror film. Or a great horror film. Or the greatest horror film ever made. Whenever I see that, I feel a great distance from it.
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