A Quote by Woody Allen
American films, it's a money-making industry. And in France, you can find great respect for cinema as art.
Related Quotes
American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.
France loves American cinema because when an American remake is successful, it makes us money to produce more French films.
I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make.
To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.
Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.
For me, learning about cinema and the craft and the art of it, through making films with great people, has been such a cool experience.
I don't want to do films for money and go back. I want to try to at least change the world through cinema, the industry, the way cinema is conceived.
The problem with American cinema is that because you're making films with huge amounts of money you need to hit the lowest common denominator in order to make it back and so therefore you're not allowed to play with moral ambiguities or ask questions.
All the interesting films are now being made by their subsidiaries for very low budgets. But the studios are not making money. They're making these big, very expensive pictures that take a lot of money but don't really pay for their costs. So they're having a very difficult time. I can see the system breaking down. I think the American studios are a reflection or a metaphor for American industry altogether, which is failing in the world. Its economic domination is being broken down and I think the same thing is happening to the studios.
In the film industry, all the money is focused on television and the stupidity of American cinema.
Basically, I have always wanted to have an art-house cinema. A cinema where we can show films that are not necessarily the current offerings on circuit and films that are not commercial.
When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
Even in Haiti, I saw John Wayne movies. American cinema has always been the dominant cinema throughout the world, and people tend to forget that. People aren't just seeing these films in California or Florida. They're seeing them in Haiti, in Congo, in France, in Italy and in Asia. That is the power of Hollywood.
I just don't feel like composing music for films because I find there is too much pretense in the industry and creativity has been replaced by the sole thought of making money.
It's true that there are younger people making films, and there are different kinds of films. This has created some attention in what's coming out of Greece, and people like to find a way to name this new ethnic cinema. It's not like there's a movement, or a common philosophy in making these films. They're just things that happened, and now people are paying attention to it.
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