A Quote by Melvin Van Peebles

I've never been to film school. I had to leave this country to make a film. All they would let me do in Hollywood was be a messenger. — © Melvin Van Peebles
I've never been to film school. I had to leave this country to make a film. All they would let me do in Hollywood was be a messenger.
You graduate from film school and move to Hollywood. Hollywood tells you, 'We're not the place for you to make films,' so you decide you have to make a film yourself.
'Baahubali' team is not after numbers. If we would have been number guys, we would have never made a film with such a huge budget. We just wanted to make the biggest war film of this country, but what it has achieved is amazing.
As an actress, I never went to film school, and I think if I had gone to film school, I would have started with a great advantage. If you have a strong intent to do anything in life, you can do it, but it always helps to have formal training.
My best film is always my next film. I couldn't make Chungking Express now, because of the way I live and drink I've forgotten how I did it. I don't believe in film school or film theory. Just try and get in there and make the bloody film, do good work and be with people you love.
Well cult is a word you would never say in Hollywood. In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, "Oh, my last film was a cult film." I'd say, "Oh great, well I hope this one isn't!"
I wanted to be a playwright in college. That's what I was interested in and that's what I was moving toward, and then I had the lucky accident of falling in love with film. I was 19 or 20 that I realized films are made by people. Shooting digitally became cheaper and better. You couldn't make something that looked like a Hollywood film, but you could make something through which you could work out ideas. I was acting, but I was also conceiving the plots and operating the camera when I wasn't onscreen. I got very unvain about film acting, and it became a sort of graduate school for me.
I didn't go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.
I am not going to do a film based on a bad scenario just to make a big Hollywood film or work with Hollywood stars.
When I talk to [my kids], I remember my father talking to me, so it's understandable that I would make a film like "Aquarius." A very good friend of mine saw the film, and she said it was clear that it had been made by someone who had just become a father.
Oh my God, I love UCLA so much. Their film school is great because it's unstructured, so there's a freedom to fail in there and just tell your story, and everybody makes a film. It's so important to have that freedom in film school because that's what you're there for: to learn and make a film.
I never want to make a film. I don't wake up in the morning going, 'Ooh, I'd really love to be on set making a film today'. I'm aware that other contemporary film directors perceive film-making as what they do, as what they have to do. But I would hope that I am more catholic in my tastes.
There hadn't been one done since the late 70s. I was living in Brooklyn, had no connection to Roger Corman, to no one in this movie. I didn't go to film school. I'm like the person who should have never made this film. But I just decided to put one foot in front of the other. I was writing film articles for magazines at the time. I convinced an editor from one of the magazines that I was working for to give me a shot to do a piece on Roger. This was an excuse to go meet him.
I had wanted to make this film [Suffragette] for over a decade. There has never been a cinematic rendition of this story. I had not been taught any of the history of the movement at school, and the version I had gleaned had been the Mary Poppins story of women in large hats, petitioning. There was another version.
To me, a revolutionary film is not a film about a revolution. It has a lot more to do with the art form. It's a film that is revolting against the old established language of cinema that had been brainwashing the people for decades. It is a film that is trying to find ways to use sound and image differently.
I just remember when I came out of film school - and I loved film school - that the industry was such a mystery. How to break in, and once you are in, how to make a film; that is such a large undertaking. There are thousands of pitfalls.
I wrote the screenplay for 'Water Lilies' while I was studying screenwriting at La Femis film school in Paris, and the director Xavier Beauvois, who was on the graduation committee, told me I had to make the film myself.
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