Top 639 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Filmmakers - Page 3

Success is really when you create a space, a piece of art, and people come in and say, that's my story - when they claim it.

There are two types of people: you have people that like psychological horror and you have those that like everything in their face.

Racism and prejudice exist there [at the National Film Board] like anywhere else. My history at the Board has not been easy. It's been a long walk.

San Francisco's winter is a season unto itself. Fleeting, rain-soaked, verdant, a brief period of shadows and renewal

Lawyers are like professional wrestlers. They pretend to get mad and fight, but then they socialize after a trial is over.

Even in a city like Barcelona, there are still some people in the city who are angry because that waterfront area is a big tourist destination, and all the rents went up, and they had to move.

The thing that our system is designed to do is keep us alone and isolated in our little consumer bubble. And the most revolutionary act of all might be finding a community of like-minded people where you can talk about these issues and figure out what to do together.

If you don't do it this year, you'll just be one year older when you do.

Some actors can draw from their own darkness.

Any movie about cult figure Charles Manson needs lots of sex, drugs and blood. But as John Roecker discovered while filming his first feature - screening Friday and Saturday only at the Avalon - the key to amping up the gore is an old standby: puppets.

People who repeatedly attack your confidence and self-esteem are quite aware of your potential, even if you are not.

Listening and being curious and wide-eyed in the world, I think, is what allows us to move forward, progress, evolve and learn and alter our behavior and become more self-aware. I think that listening is kind of what its all about.

Sci-Fi is incredibly challenging and has its own language. I have to speak its language; it's not going to learn mine.

One thing I'm not is a moralistic filmmaker. I'm not trying to tell people what to do, and I'm not trying to lead.

I have been swamped all my life with the idea of the unlimited potential and resources of the American Dream. Not only is this untrue, but it's an injustice to those people who don't have access to this utopia.

The reward is the finished product, for me that is my light at the end of the tunnel. What comes together in the end is why I do this [shoot commercials], it's why I write so many ideas and spend so much time thinking of ideas and so on and so forth.

Scholars have been arguing for a long time whether the Soviet Union could have been turned into some kind of social democracy. I doubt it myself. I think what Gorbachev didn't quite understand, until it was too late, is that his efforts at change unleashed new, certrifical forces he hadn't counted on. He opened the door a crack and a huge wind blew it open.

I'm a control freak, so that's why I became a director.

I've always had great independence on everything I've done. Nobody's ever told me not to do anything.

I was inspired by Maya Deren because she was the first woman filmmaker whose films I saw. I also loved Fellini and Goddard because they were so different from Hollywood films. But when I saw the cinema verite films that were made by Drew Associates with Leacock and Pennebaker I found my passion.

A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.

I think it's a problem if you don't compensate people that have got no money, because I really feel you're exploiting them.

The filmmaker is not telling you what to think.

I'm not hoping to see that day but I know that my cinema will reach Filipinos. I know that they will embrace it one day. It will happen. I'm very sure of that. I still have faith in cinema. I still believe it can affect change.

There is a straight-forward definition for 'Independent Filmmaking'. The term references a group of films that are financed by money that comes from outside the studio system. In a literal sense that is what it means.

The cool kids have co-opted all the neat stuff ? computers, gadgets, video games. Theres no such thing as a computer geek anymore.

An actor uses his body as a tool and an instrument. In the same way a musician plays an instrument, the actor uses his body to convey feeling and emotion. An animator uses a pencil or a computer to create the same thing, the same exact way... An actor is taking words that are not his own, and he has to bring some kind of authentic life to those words. It's the same goal, to create this authentic life. Even if it's a drawing, or if it's a cartoon, you're still trying to create authenticity because, if the character emotes authentically, it has a power to connect with the audience.

Dates can be important. It's a nice way to remember when I took the photo without having to rack my brain or look in the archives. It also makes every photo important, because there is the date. I can take a picture of nothing, but at least we know when I took it.

Instead of loving people and using money, people often love money and use people.

With a living person you're always burdened with this idea of fair representation, treading this fine line between honoring the person, and yet you really look at the word "honor," it implies that you then have to address struggle and hardship and failure, and all these things that it means to be human, that you show the fullness of their life. If the person's living, they are able to interject.

The essence of the cinema that I'm interested in is a combination of love, rage, and curiosity. Sometimes it's hard to see those intentions, or maybe it's hard to portray them on film in a way that doesn't sound too preachy or irrelevant. So instead of saying it out loud, you say it multiple times in the movie by hiding it. You get a sensation after you see the whole film throughout yourself.

Holland is a fairly small country, and in a weird way, somewhat conservative. That might surprise people because it is a very tolerant place, but it's also a somewhat Calvinist country. There isn't much flexibility in changing people's perspectives.

Giving people what they want reduces us to consumers instead of treating us like citizens, consumers who are on the prowl for the predictable and comfortable. What we want winds up being suspiciously like what we've already got, more of the same-the cultural equivalent of a warm bath.

I have always made films simultaneously, so they go hand in hand. I think that my books are like films.

I have looked for the center of the art scene. I went to Paris as a student. I lived in Venice, California.

Treat everyone like a gentleman, not because they are, but because you are.

John Facenda could read a laundry list and make it sound like the Constitution of the United States.

I think not many young people are willing to pay the price of telling their own story.

Manson's the man who's responsible for "killing the Sixties." He really knew how to play up the whole "most dangerous man alive" thing when at the time, the most dangerous man alive was Richard Nixon.

I feel that we should try and understand how we as women storytellers have often fallen into the mode of telling stories in the ways in which traditionally men would. I often find that my points of view are expressed by male characters.

Cinema is always a political art, at the end.

Pakistani feature films are all about catering to the male ego and male fantasy.

If people spend two hours thinking about the direction of their own lives and can relate to the stories they see on screen, to me that's a success.

Who know what life is going to be like. I mean, there was no demand for the spaces before. It's not like people were flocking to Sochi before; they just didn't have enough hotel rooms and arenas to fill the need. So that's what we'll look at when we go there. But we'll wait a few years until things kind of return to normal.

When Steve Wise told me that he intended to argue in court before a judge that an animal could be a "legal person," it seemed like a novel, possibly far-fetched idea, but the more I thought about it, the more I became intrigued.

Everyone has access to a pen and paper, but to be a great writer is difficult.

The biggest challenge [for movie Agnus dei] - working in a foreign country with a predominantly Polish cast and crew - also proved to be the biggest blessing. Being surrounded by all this change , [both] culturally [and] linguistically, was a new and refreshing inspiration.

How do popular attitudes get formed? Do the movies just reflect it or inform it? Where does this particular idea come from? I don't know if I can say anything too illuminating.

I don't think you can become what they became without being more than just a pretty face and a great body - you had to have something else.

When you're an artist, your personal life and your professional life kind of blend together. I'm writing from home so I don't have an office or anything. I don't know where to draw the line between "Okay, let's stop now and watch American Idol."

I'm an audience member first. My inspiration is still based on hunger. Often, when people try to tell me "nobody wants that story; I'm like bullshit because I want it."

I have no doubt that aggressively going after wrongdoing can result in real improvement. Fewer wrongdoers in city government means more honest employees; it means better city services; it means more efficient government. And punishing wrongdoing can have a strong ripple effect that deters others from going down the wrong path.

For me, it's important that a movie is the congregate of all art forms, from writing to art composition to music to performing. Trying to keep a balance of all those is what I think a director's job is.

Working on a set and working with actors, that's all the same. The moment you're doing it and you're in the moment, you don't have time to think about it. You just have to make it as good as you possibly can on the moment.

Although the traditional focus of Valentine's Day is on women and the gifts they desire, this survey found that not only do men like to get gifts for Valentine's Day, but they also like those gifts to be luxurious. Sixty-three percent of the people we surveyed agreed that this Valentine's Day, Johnnie Walker Blue Label is a great gift for the men in their lives.

What you hope, what you're trusting the filmmaker to do, is to capture the emotional truth of the situation.

You won't find another Chaplin, you won't find another Keaton, because the school is closed.

I have always said that archival images are images without imagination. They petrify thought and kill any power of evocation.

I am looking for the disconnected connection

Cocaine and crack are essentially the same thing. Cocaine is a middle-class drug. Crack is a poor person's drug, which carries a felony conviction for possession. And once you get this felony conviction, which given that the whole community is pretty much strung out on it, you become basically sidelined into an alternative kind of lifestyle. You become completely marginalized. You can't get public housing, you can't get a lot of jobs, you can't vote. You have a real problem doing anything to get you out of the rut that you're in. You become basically a non - person.