Top 1200 Film Noir Quotes & Sayings

I'm into clothes, but in a way that's related to wanting to walk into a film noir movie. You know, I love to go to vintage stores, but mostly it's stuff that I don't have anywhere to wear... I don't have the life that goes with the clothes.

Noir deals with the disenfranchised: people who can't catch a break under normal circumstances. In noir books, you root for these people, but you know they are going to fail. That's what makes them so compellingly human. I can relate to that kind of stuff.

I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.

With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it.

At the very least, noir offers an alternate reality - moments of real passion, a bleak code of honor, and a need for freedom amid corruption. At its best, noir offers a map of subversion.

There are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

I was influenced by American movies of the '60s and '70s, especially Don Siegel's 'Dirty Harry' and the films of Sam Peckinpah. And, of course, a lot of the film noir movies of the '40s.

I grew up on film noir.

In classic noir fiction and film, it is always hot. Fans whirr in sweltering hotel rooms, sweat forms on a stranger's brow, the muggy air stifles - one can hardly breathe. Come nightfall, there is no relief, only the darkness that allows illicit lovers to meet, the trusted to betray, and murderers to act.

I love all kinds of stuff. I really am so eclectic in my taste. I love film noir, I love thrillers, and I love big blockbuster popcorn cinema stuff, but I like it when it's twinged with a bit more social consciousness.

Director Lee Chang-dong's 1997 noir 'Green Fish.' I was attending middle school when I first watched the piece. And although I could not completely understand the film and where it was getting at, I still found it extremely powerful.

You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.

That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.

I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze. Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don't want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it's frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting...I quite like to be in that maze.

To me, the most interesting approach to film noir is subjective. The genre is really all about not knowing what's going on around you, and that fear of the unknown. The only way to do that effectively is to really get into the maze, rather than look at the maze from above, so that's where I sort of come at it.

I wouldn't apply high frame rates to a love story or a thriller or a film noir or a mystery.

When we say 'cinematic', we tend to think John Ford and vistas and wide-open spaces. Or we think of kinetic camera movement or of a certain number of cinematic styles, like film noir.

Billy Wilder is really is a heavy influence on Bound. We felt that film noir was a genre where you could create a really contained story. We wanted to be on a set as much as we could to get the kind of style level we were looking for.

I like Public School and En Noir.

I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.

Like art, love, and pornography, noir is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. For the purposes of the book and my longtime working understanding and definition of it, noir stories are bleak, existential, alienated, pessimistic tales about losers--people who are so morally challenged that they cannot help but bring about their own ruin.

I wanted to work with Sriram Raghavan, the master of noir.

When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Ox Bow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross that defines what kind of drama it is.

In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.'

I think the original Matrix was really incredible. It was so original and it did so many innovative things with film. It was a much bigger film. Bound was just a smaller film. It was kind of like an old noir film

Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.

I'm working on something that's not yet novel-shaped but is something of a film-noir-flavored 'Alice in Wonderland.' It will also very likely be a single volume story and not the start of a series.

I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

I love film noir, so Billy Wilder is like my favorite director of all time.

Yeah, I was always a big fan of noir.

I guess what's most surprised me in most of the reviews is that they don't seem to get the noir story in the dream sequence, so they analyze it like a straight noir movie.

Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of the creators of classic noir - novelists and screenwriters, directors and cameramen - were men. Women were their mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of desire.

I'd love to play a femme fatale in a film noir. I'm thinking of one of those roles that Lauren Bacall or Bette Davis might have played. What I wouldn't like is to suddenly find myself being cast, as many senior actresses seem to be, as the abbess in a convent.

I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I'm sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.

It's possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it's possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir.

I love noir, quite obviously.

There is something missing in a lot of digital filmmaking, something I call "poetic reality." That's something you see played out in film noir, where the technique establishes the mood.

(In) most cop shows, every cop in the squad speaks exactly the same and the same kind of short clipped film noir-ish talk.

I'm really a sucker for old, old movies. Like old film noir. I don't know. I also really enjoy independent movies.

In D&D, you're only in that fantasy world. But with GURPS, you can, like, play a game that's Los Angeles film noir, or a game where the premise is you are world-jumpers, and you can go to different worlds.

Sometimes it feels as if the artist hasn't done the real work of engaging with the material. Film noir can't just play off looks and attitudes. A thriller needs a dose of genuine suspense. It does not have to be literal, but it does have to feel genuine. Otherwise the artist is just leeching off the form.

It's a noir world. Unfair things happen.

Yes, to me that's one of the most compelling fears in film noir and the psychological thriller genre - that fear of conspiracy. It's definitely something that I have a fear of - not being in control of your own life. I think that's something people can relate to, and those genres are most successful when they derive the material from genuine fears that people have.

I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.

I think the original Matrix was really incredible. It was so original and it did so many innovative things with film. It was a much bigger film. Bound was just a smaller film. It was kind of like an old noir film.

Film noir has a mood that everyone can feel. It’s people in trouble, at night, with a little bit of wind and the right kind of music. It’s a beautiful thing.

Old film-noir movies. There's something comforting about watching black-and-white movies, and hearing this kind of music just puts me in a fantasy world. It's a really great escape for me.

As the tall dark and handsome male star, Carey Grant always stands for male beauty and desirability, whether in a 30s screwball, a 40s film noir, or a 50s romantic comedy. He consequently turns around the orthodox gender between the one who looks and so desires, and the one who is looked at, and so is being desired.

I'd love to do a noir. I think Steve McQueen is so cool. But a classic film is a classic film, and perhaps the fantasy of being those characters should be left alone. You're treading on very thin ice.

I first saw Walter Hill's second film, 'The Driver,' as a teenager, late at night on the BBC, quite possibly sitting too close to the telly. Given that this 1978 slice of neo-noir takes place almost entirely in the dark streets of a deserted downtown L.A., it's really a perfect midnight movie.

'SNL' came out in the '70s. It's a different zeitgeist. It's hard to re-create it, just as it would be hard to do a black-and-white noir film now. The culture's different.

There were some things that I found I really enjoyed singing about; like, on the title track, there's this film-noir character of a woman who's sort of losing it in a room.

So I grew up watching film noir, you know the classic stuff. William Holden, Richard Widmark, Robert Mitchum, all those.

I am grateful for what I call well-spent moments: Making a tuna fish sandwich with the works. Taking at least a half hour to eat it outside. Ironing my vintage tea towels while watching old black-and-white film noir movies and sipping one martini with extra olives - a quirky combination, but it works.

Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.

Anything that has to do with noir and space, I'm gonna love. When you've got a noir-ish, pulpy detective in a science fiction show, I'm all in, in that regard.

The thing I loved about the cartoons I grew up with is, to this day, I'm still just starting to get certain references from Bugs Bunny cartoons. I'll see some film noir movie and go, 'Wait, that's what Bugs Bunny was quoting!' I like the idea we made the unfolding fortune cookie for ten years from now.

The AW14 collection is inspired by Film Noir. Elements of masculinity and femininity were reflected in the fabric, tailoring, and features.

Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.