A Quote by F. Gary Gray

Most of music videos were short films - they had dialogue, action sequences. I shot with cranes and helicopters. I wanted to created cinema-like moments.

F. Gary Gray

Quote Author

F. Gary Gray
American - Director
Born: July 17, 1969

I was doing well in TV as a freelance cameraman, but it wasn't the direction I wanted to go in. I directed videos and tried to put something cinematic in every one. Dialogue, action sequences, helicopter, Steadicam.

F. Gary Gray

Some people draw a line between music videos and short films, looking down on music videos as a format, but there's so much potential in music videos.

Hiro Murai

I still don't understand why the tag of 'action hero' follows me. My films have all these elements - romance, action and comedy. None of the fight sequences of my character is an act of randomness. There's a reason to action in my films.

Sunny Deol

My love of visual sequences stems from live-action films like Sergio Leone westerns, Kurosawa, some '70s action films, Tex Avery, and my general love of animated movement.

Genndy Tartakovsky

I never knew I wanted to become a ballerina. I was discovered at the age of 13. I had a love for movement even though I had no exposure to dance other than what I saw in music videos, like hip-hop music videos. But I knew that I loved moving.

Misty Copeland

We wanted to not necessarily tell the story of the video or the song, but create an ambience. And I think now, I think that's gone now. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think we were all trying to make mini feature films. I remember when we were making the Duran videos, I would crop the top and bottom of the screen with black. So that it looked more like cinema.

Russell Mulcahy

I had seen some films made about the underground music world in Tehran, and most of them were short documentaries about 30 or 40 minutes long. And I always wondered why they weren't publicized more. Really, their only flaw was they were short documentaries.

Bahman Ghobadi

Going as far back as 'Dexter's Lab,' we've always had these sequences with no dialogue. The interesting thing is those sequences got the biggest reactions.

Genndy Tartakovsky

I have never intended in any of my films to sell violence or to glorify it. Even in the most intense action sequences in my films, there is a message about how evil violence is.

John Woo

I had my boundaries and restrictions of doing films so I stopped working in the eighties. This was an era when films were more action oriented. Most of the characters cast in the pivotal roles were either daakus or police inspectors. My face suits neither of these characters. I cannot look like a daaku, so acting had taken a back seat.

Randhir Kapoor

'Death Sentence' really is a throwback to the '70s style revenge drama with moments of action. It's like a contemporary 'Death Wish' with a much more thriller style storyline, but the action scenes I shot very much in the style of '70s films like 'The French Connection.'

James Wan

Cinema is not truth. Even when you make documentary films, you can choose to show this shot and not the other shot - this side and not the other side. In cinema, there's one truth - not 'the truth.' It's only 'my point of view.' Cinema is powerful because of that.

Rithy Panh

. . . it is true that language and forward movement in the cinema are jolly hard to reconcile. It's a very, very, difficult thing to do. . . . There is still a place in the cinema for movies that are driven by the human face, and not by explosions and cars and guns and action sequences . . . there's such a thing as action and speed within thought rather than within a ceaseless milkshake of images.

David Hare

A lot of people were getting million-dollar deals from music I felt was trash, because their videos were going viral. I wanted to put out music that had soul, because that's what was missing.