A Quote by Francis Ford Coppola

I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, "I learned so much today," that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It's only 100 years old.
We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?
I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?'
I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. What I learned from it is that today seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly.
More than my other films, Uncle Boonmee is very much about cinema, that's also why it's personal. If you care to look, each reel of the film has a different style - acting style, lighting style, or cinematic references - but most of them reflect movies. I think that when you make a film about recollection and death, you have to consider that cinema is also dying - at least this kind of old cinema that nobody makes anymore.
I first came to cinema as a passionate filmgoer, when I was a child. Then, when I was a very young man, I became a film critic precisely because of my knowledge of cinema. I did better than others because of this. Then I moved on to screenwriting. I wrote a film with Sergio Leone, 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' And then I moved to directing.
There's something magical about film, it's the ultimate for me, because it's kind of permanent - inasmuch as anything is. When I went to see Buster Keaton when I was about 14 and I came out of the cinema having really laughed at this film which had been made 50 years before, I thought: That's immortality. It's fantastic.
I'll definitely say that, before film school, I didn't have much of a film-history background. I didn't know much about classic cinema.
In the U.S., some extraordinary movies have been made on politics and social issues. We learned lots of things from American cinema. But in the last ten or fifteen years, this has changed drastically. Today, that kind of movie is much easier to make in Europe.
I was a young film student around the time of the new wave in film in the 1970s; old Hollywood was naff and over. For me, as a film student, I was going to see French and Italian cinema; American cinema was 'Easy Rider' and 'Taxi Driver.' Everything was gritty.
Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. The only true cinema verite would be what Andy Warhol did with his film about the Empire State Building - eight hours or so from one angle, and even then it's not really cinema verite, because you aren't actually there.
Just look at the cinema itself: It's comprised of lots of movies about graphic novels, and if you're not 20 years old and wearing a cape and a mask and white, you're out of business. Today's cinema is a proliferation of comedies, which are in some ways creating caricature images. They're one-dimensional.
I'm not coming from film school, I learned cinema in the cinema watching films.
You get very little from the studios anymore, it's all independent. And I think the studio, with the exception of something like The Social Network, a fine film, very interesting, but as for studio pictures, that's it, what else? There was more only a few years ago. So it changes, and I'm trying as much as I can.
I kind of worry about that a little bit - we lost our film culture for 30 years because the Americans came in and bought up all the cinema chains and wouldn't show any Australian films.
When I say that it's taken us [with Luca Guadagnino ] 11 years to make this film, what I mean is that it was 11 years ago that we started to talk about a kind of cinema that we wanted to make together.
Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.
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