Top 639 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Filmmakers

For example, instead of being asked to write an article, suddenly editors wanted me to make super-short videos. The assumptions of those video gigs was that kids don't read as much news and basically need to be read to, which I found really problematic and kind of insulting. I thought, Isn't it just that you don't have any money and that's why you want me to make some crappy "content" for your website?

The future begins today.

I really dislike it when women reject feminism; that's ridiculous. I am a product of feminism. Without feminism I would not be making films.

It's been an obsession of various genres, disciplines, and aspects and elements of movie-making. It's always been something that I've really aspired to, so doing something new and different, reinventing myself and working with new people is just the passport to the amazing world that is the movies.

When you don't work together you can't emerge as a force. It becomes what some call a "lonely struggle" and individual self-destruction.

In the same way that we want to expand mental health service for people with mental illness, we also need to make sure that our police officers are getting the mental health help they need.

America, the great liberator, is in desperate need of being liberated from itself - from its own excesses and arrogance. And the world needs to be liberated from American values and culture, spreading across the planet as if by divine providence.

You have to remain open to the situation that you're filming otherwise you might miss the story.

What we face in Canada are multiple overlapping crises. We have the climate crisis, which is screaming down on us - all of the predictions are coming true even faster than the scientists thought. We have the inequality crisis, where the Panama Papers are a great reminder that the one per cent have actually created their own economy. We still have the crisis of child poverty, which has never been dealt with despite decades of concerned words from politicians.

Exactly one day in your life your kid will ski as good as you do. The next day, he'll ski better than you.

I do feel a kinship with anthropology or ethnography, although when you hear those terms you think of something exotic. Generally, photographic anthropology has that taste of the faraway or undiscovered place. But my anthropology has more to do with what's in my reach.

I don't want the people I'm with on this journey to feel like I'm filming them all the time. I don't want them to constantly feel as though they're being watched. So I will have the camera ready at all times, but I will only film when something is really worth filming. Those are the moments when the person being filmed is usually not aware of it.

There's still a 1950s view of cinema, that there's one audience and they all want to see the same thing.

Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them.

With photography, I like to leave a lot of the story, even to myself.

The whales do not sing because they have an answer, they sing because they have a song.

As I look back on my fondness for the outdoors, and specifically the elements in nature that I find visually stimulating, I am surprised at how often the theme of dead trees arise. I guess it's that each one seems to have a story of its own, representing many years of living through everything that nature could throw at them.

Even after forty years of directing, shooting and editing films, when I collaborate with a male partner, people still perceive the man as the primary filmmaker.

Through a lot of scientific and left-hemisphere thinking in the last 400 years, we've separated ourselves from nature, as if we were superior. We were looking at nature as a resource that we could manipulate. I think we're coming to a new understanding that it's just impossible. We are nature. We can't remove ourselves. We need to think more interdependently.

The Hollywood system has its own problems. Movie making is never an easy job.

The population suffers from a fear of change, for their conditioning assumes a static identity, and challenging ones belief system, usually results in insult and apprehension, for being wrong is erroneously associated with failure. When in fact, to be proven wrong should be a celebrated, for it is elevating someone to a new level of understanding.

Cinema is the greatest mirror of humanity's struggle. You see this alternative world, but you're part of it. Everybody is part of it. This is our world.

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer.

For all filmmakers: True originality is the key, only direct your own unique movie scripts, be a megalomaniac and not give a damn.

Coral reefs are the backbone for the entire ocean. They are the nursery for the ocean. About a quarter of all marine life in the ocean spends part of its lifecycle on a coral reef. And there are about a billion or so people that depend on coral reefs for fish for their food, for protein.

Everything in Athens is probably a good example. Any time when there really isn't a need for these facilities in these cities, but they get built anyway for the games, everybody has kind of wishful thinking about what the afterlife of these spaces is going to be. If there is not demand for it before the Olympics, there's probably not going to be demand for it afterwards.

Whenever I'm looking for actors, I'm always looking for actors who are intelligent and who feel fresh and who feel authentic to the world.

Resistance to change is always the biggest obstacle.

The filmmakers are very much in their own kind of bubble. It was kind of a revelation to me and I realized why so many of the great filmmakers are one of a kind people. You know, they have a vision. They may be influenced by other filmmakers, but they don't work with them on anything.

If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. It really is public brainwashing and misinformation.

I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.

It is hard to explain to people now how hard it was being a punk back then [the 1970s]. If you had short hair, didn't wear bell bottoms and walked down the street, chances are some asshole in an El Camino was going to kick your ass.

I find it hard to argue with Reagan's old slogan: Trust, but verify.

What I remember about being painted was a very severe atmosphere. I remember her intensity and sharp glance.

I grew up watching movies that just transformed my vision, not just in cinema, in life, and you discover that this - it's an endless tool.

You know so many documentaries now are very carefully scripted before you start, and then people are sort of put in chairs which are beautifully lit, and they tell their stories and you do that with another 10 people and you then construct a story from what they say. You do a sort of paper thing, and then you put some images in-between, and that's your film. And that's so not what I think is a good documentary. It can be so much more than that, it should be much more of an adventure and much more uncertain... like real things are.

For me, directing is sort of like cooking or something. You know that you're making this interesting recipe while you're putting all the ingredients together, you can never oversee what it's gonna taste exactly. So while you're doing that, you're tasting.

Silence kills the soul; it diminishes its possibilities to rise and fly and explore. Silence withers what makes you human. The soul shrinks, until it's nothing.

I see myself as a storyteller, I don't mind if the story is fact or fiction, if it's a good story I'd like to tell it.

'Write what you know' works, but it's limiting. Write what fascinates you. Write what you can't stop thinking about.

The world wants to define me by my mammary glands and melanin. It is just fascinating that Michael Mann has never been asked what it is like to be a white male filmmaker.

People say that you can't change people's minds with a movie or book, but how do they get formed in the first place? They get formed by what we see and read. In a certain way, movies are ahead of their times. People make them and don't really know if the audience will respond to them. Once in a while, they do.

Much to my chagrin, I think that cinema has gone the wrong way in America because in many ways, I pioneered the use of video which eventually became digital video. Everyone can do it; it's Pop Art time: "Everything is art, why should you take it so seriously, after all it's kind of like a clambake." I don't buy that.

I've never been interested in the convention of dialogue that facilitates narrative-it's always sort of bored me. I find myself zoning out just listening to cadences of voices and tonality and this sort of thing.

Life is interesting. Non-life, not so much.

I love when you take bizarre, non-human things and somehow make them human or accessible. I think that's why I like the practical effects. You can look at a creature and still see vulnerability or the character behind the creature. To get character behind CG creatures, that's so few and far between.

Most people in the Middle East at the moment, even if they are totally open-minded about possible peace, nobody does anything. It's an age of indifference in a way. It's like: "OK, terrible things are happening here, terrible things are happening there... forget it. We'll keep on going for our own benefit."

Making films is - or should be - a very personal experience. You shouldn't listen to anybody, other than the people you choose to listen to.

One of the most powerful ways to keep people controlled is to use faith or guns or both.

It is a reality. People are being victimized or are being targeted to be victims each and every day.

A film is a machine made of images

Perhaps making movies is a step toward being able to move backward and forward and in and out of linear time.

Tell me a fact, and I'll learn. Tell me a truth, and I'll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.

Water is our most precious and interconnected natural resource. It sustains all ecosystems, communities, and economies from local watersheds to the seas. It's vital to sustaining our health, safety, and the environments in which we live and work. Simply put, water is life.

It's often frustrating when you're a war reporter and you're covering these places that far away. You're frustrated by making stories that people can't connect to in any way. It's hard for Americans to connect to Arabic-speaking Iraqis in refugee camps or Pashto-speaking Afghans in the countryside, and having a character who is a vehicle through which you're allowed to make these relationships really allowed us to gain in an emotional weight that was difficult for us to do any other way to make it all human.

I'm interested in cinematic realism. I think there is a rich potential to bring to audiences people they haven't seen before, that they are discovering a bit like how we discover people in life for the first time. There's an authenticity that can't be denied.

Play in curiosity is where everything happens.

When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money.

I am very, very tuned into people. If something's wrong, I can sense it from the moment they walk in the studio.

Children with harsh fathers accept much of what is thrown their way as normal because they don’t have a frame of reference for anything else, and this twisted template unfortunately becomes the basis for their picture of the heavenly Father.