A Quote by Woody Allen

When I was a young man, my friends and I and all of us in New York were very influenced by French cinema. French cinema played an enormous influence on those of us who wanted to be filmmakers.
We grew up near a cinematheque in Cleveland, so we were very influenced by international cinema, the French New Wave, Italian neo-realists.
My mother and stepfather were documentary filmmakers and, of course, had a very healthy Scandinavian mentality. When it came to cinema, my mother was very obsessed with the French New Wave. That was her generation.
French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.
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.
People know that I have a great love for cinema. Not just for commercial cinema, but for the “cinema d’auteur.” But to me, two of the great “auteurs” are actually actors and they both happen to be French. One is Alain Delon and the other is Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Indian cinema is no more limited to audiences in India. We have viewers all around the world, and hence, understanding the global perspective is a must. Cinema Beyond Boundaries would get the viewers and the filmmakers together and would help us in serving them with good quality cinema.
One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.
Blade Runner is one of my favorite films. But, so many thing influenced me that aren't science fiction because they were just good drama. I grew up watching a lot of French cinema. I was in love with The English Patient, and movies that are very romantic in nature and have a positive message. That's a large part of my fingerprint.
There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.
The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry.
France loves American cinema because when an American remake is successful, it makes us money to produce more French films.
We have been influenced by you in the U.S. a lot. Not because anybody exerted pressure on us - if anyone puts pressure on us, we go the other way. But if you put a movie in the cinema and I watch it, I will be influenced.
It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.
Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.
When I started as a young chef, I was Italian, and I was a woman, and everyone else in New York was French and a man.
What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.
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