Top 639 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Filmmakers - Page 4

Even if I made pornography, the trauma would show, though. It will always be there because it's my verité. It's my kind of narrative, it's my kind of storytelling. It's not style; it's just there.

And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images.

It's always scary making a film as I never set anything up or ask anyone to do anything, so I worry that we'll find a story. I have to trust that a film will come out of the journey we embark on. I have many, many sleepless nights.

One thing people often forget when making a documentary is that, in a sense, you still have to cast, find a star, and it has all of those built-in challenges.

I think the most important thing people can do is to learn about their watershed. And it's something no one knows.

My first teacher was Steven Spielberg. I worked on Amazing Stories. That was my first job, as a writer and as a story editor. Watching him and his command of the tools of filmmaking, and his admiration for writing and the story itself, was the greatest lesson I ever had.

Not to be to be a vulgar materialist or be too reductive, but all of that was completely absent from the conversation. Instead we were told it was a "revolutionary" moment, where these new tools would inevitably displace the old media dinosaur and that things would be democratized and wasn't it great we could all collaborate on these platforms.

I would like to find a more precise way to not only tell the stories of female characters, but also do so in a female "way." My biggest advice would be to trust yourself.

Despite his deeply-held ideology, Reagan was willing to talk to Gorbachev. He willing to do business with him. We should realize that engaging with adversaries is often one of our great strengths. As long as we use the engagement to stand up for the things we care about, there is no harm in talking.

I've never wanted to be a fireman, in my life. I've never really wanted to grow up and be anything other than a film director.

I think Canada deserves a forthrightly left electoral alternative. I don't see the advantage for our democracy in having a number of parties crowded in the centre. The Liberals are experts at co-opting left language and framings during campaigns, and historically, we know they don't govern like that.

If you make a film set in London or in Pakistan or wherever, the thing that interests me is the relationships between individuals - individuals and society, individuals and their family, their girlfriend or boyfriend, it's all the same idea.

"Filipino" is the Spanish side of our history. The islands were named after King Felipe, so we became known as Filipinos. It's a brand, it's a name. But we're Malays. Before colonizers came to our shores, we were Malays. My praxis is about being Malay - the struggle of the Malays before we became Filipinos.

Never seek financial independence in independent cinema since independent cinema doesn't make money.

I am particularly pleased to see that there are so many women working in documentary film.

The digital formats keep changing so rapidly. I feel like so many people are shooting digital but the quality is being lost. There's a texture and a richness to the 35 format that's incomparable.

I want every scene to feel electric and I try to finish the filming period with a clear trajectory: a beginning, a middle, and hopefully an end.I hate "fly on the wall." It infers that I don't relate to the people we're with and that I don't get affected by events. I like it when people talk to me. I never say things like "Don't look at the camera" - how bossy!

Music documentaries are hard to tell, but I think they're an amazing vehicle to look at racism, our attitude to sex, the way we judge drugs. There's the ability to get a big audience because of these incredible, iconic, charismatic people. You can look at a number of issues - the challenge is to make sure you choose something that has all those issues. Popular music is like a mirror of culture, of who we are.

Everybody has someone in their life that has breast cancer. It touches femininity, motherhood and sexuality and as Barbara Brenner says in the film, "you get to say breast out loud in public." Big corporations know this and market in a particular way knowing that women make most of the buying decisions in a household.

I would give female filmmakers the same advice I’d give any filmmaker; believe in your vision, believe in your team, believe in yourself.

I'm a filmmaker who is known for these ambiguous portraits that tell multiple sides of the story without really telling the audience what to think.

Find an organization, shoot them an email, call them up, find them on Facebook and say "Hey, I want to volunteer." And that first step could lead to a whole life of engagement. It could be a pretty exciting ride.

Every city and country just has a different reason for wanting to host the [Olympic] games.

Of course there is sometimes a price to pay. While I was busy painting, not only was my light dissipating quickly, but the fog had crept in slowly at the same time. When I lifted my eyes from the panel, I realized that I had better get a move on - and quickly.

Since a camera is something too heavy for women and initially made for men, you need a good cameraman.

The point is, there's this new sense of skepticism and questioning toward tech, even if it is pretty inchoate. What I hope the book helps to do is help people clarify what is amiss, by presenting a critique that is grounded in economics.

Fighting the wild branches of a haunted tree is not something that every actor is confident enough to attack, literally and figuratively.

When you stop looking for something, you see it right in front of you.

I think every film is somehow a political film. You show a perspective and a world that has logic, and that logic is inserted into a political environment, and it means something. Yes, why not?

The PURPOSE of the DATA INTEGRITY BOARD review meeting is NOT for the purpose of reviewing the INTEGRITY of the paperwork because that has already been decided, it is for the PURPOSE of determining the CHARACTER & STANDING of THE MAN/WOMAN who brought the perfect paperwork and was intending to use the perfect paperwork for COMMERCIAL settlement and closure. So they have to find out if the STATUS and CHARACTER of the party who is going to use the paperwork was going to be ALLOWED to use it.

The best actors in the world are the actors who don't keep the walls up all the time and allow themselves the potential to be embarrassed.

I've never been very interested in literary narrative in movies, it always seems an obligatory trait and the least interesting of all the things film can do. It forces us to look through the thing instead of at it, it teaches us to ignore our senses and look for meaning outside the immediate world of our experience.

Oil companies earned a permanent enemy in me when they messed with the electric car the first time around, and I think they continue to do a disservice in making it seem like fossil fuels are cheaper than they really are in terms of total cost.

Climate definitely interests the climate crowd at some science magazines, talks or blogs. Some blogs are amazing. They will post one comment about one graph of temperature records from tree rings and get over a thousand comments. Which is boredom so purified and crystalized it's in an unadulterated form that could make even a robot want to commit suicide.

Learning how to do some of the technical work on the film can be helpful too and allows you to start the film on your own. However, if you are passionate about an idea, just begin.

This movie came as a reaction to reality. I realized that I do not know that 80 of the population that lives poor in my city. I wanted to make a social experiment putting in the same car several people from different social classes, just to see what would happen.

In Holland, things were pretty stale for me. Even though there were a lot of good influences and a certain openness to music and art and literature, I just wanted to go somewhere less familiar - somewhere bigger.

Change. Adapt. Bend so as not to be broken. Let opportunity guide your actions.

When you're speaking very articulately and you're poised and you hold yourself well, that to me seems to indicate a certain way of being in life. You're in a certain place. And, whenever you break up with someone of many years, you tend to go down spiraling out of control, down some rabbit hole of sorts.

Water can be a blessing or a curse. Too often we make conservation about saving a whale, a coral reef or a marsh. But we don't make it about saving life. The one thing that every single human being has in common is our need for water.

I believe if you work really hard and follow what you want to do in life that that combination - I believe in it. You need to take risks.

In my early thirties I was working in television as a researcher. I was really stuck for a period of five years. I got to TV when I was thirty. I hated being a music writer, and kept wondering why I couldn't be doing the exciting things that my friends were doing in television.

I would not be as married to locations and ideas, when I show up in the city that I'm actually going to shoot it in. You really have to roll with it. That perfect thing you have in your head just isn't going to be there sometimes, and you have to figure out what you're going to do, if you can't find it.

The change doesn't come from Washington ever. Change comes from below. It comes from the pressure building amongst the American people.

I'm completely self-taught. I absolutely don't believe in art or film schools!

Rather than listening to music while you paint, listen to the sort of wisdom that can help grow your career.

In teaching, I like being able to present clips from movies on VHS or DVD and then talk about them. That's what this movie is.

Water - a thoroughly underrated drink.

Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.

Civilisation never dies, it may change, but it is eternal. Where the paddy field is born on the dry river bed of Titash, there begins another civilisation.

Spend at least 20-30% of your time marketing. You have to pay for this either way. Either you pay a gallery to do this for you , or you put your time and effort into it. Unless people see the great art you're making, they'll never buy it.

Every time I sit down with him, I know why he is who he is, and that's really cool. It's a great feeling. It sucks because I'm so not an ass-kisser, but he's George Lucas.

I think the worst reaction that I could get from someone to my photos is some sort of mediocre, middle-range reaction where they really get nothing from it, and they want to move on to the next thing. [I'd rather they be] horrified, pissed off at me, extremely disgusted at how bad of an artist I am.

At birth man is offered only one choice --the choice of his death. But if this choice is governed by distaste for his own existence, his life will never have been more than meaningless.

I earn my living by teaching film, mostly filmmaking but also teaching courses on current cinema. I'm interested in movies. I hope that's not all I'm interested in. In that sense, it's maybe a little misleading. I don't expect to make another movie about films, but I may continue to write about them.

I certainly wasn’t Roger Deakins, but I felt like I could be.

There are not a ton of people buying cars - cars are expensive. So people usually go for the cheapest car they can get. And if the price of gasoline falls again, it makes the savings that you get with an electric car harder to realize.

Climate change isn?t a distant threat. It?s already changing the way we live.

Making movies wasn't really an immediate thought, where I was raised. I was going to be a lawyer, and I thought I would just draw. So, I was sketching all the time and I realized that I needed some outlet, and then I found animation.

If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings, you see how people were depicted inside nature, not outside it. It was a kind of dream time. That's what I'm exploring.