Top 1200 Film Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up?

African films should be thought of as offering as many different points of view as the film of any other different continent. Nobody would say that French film is all European film, or Italian film is all European film. And in the same way that those places have different filmmakers that speak to different issues, all the countries in Africa have that too.

My writing process is consecutive, like, 'mad scientist' crazy. It's not totally writing something that rhymes or even writing a rap necessarily. Sometimes it's just writing down stuff that I'm going through.

There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present for that film to be a moving work. When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particularly deep emotion while watching that film. I believe that it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the filmmaker to make his film in the first place.

Historically, art and music and writing and film have been one of the only tools that is effective against tyranny.

I am open to writing more, and not just film scripts but maybe also a book.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

That's one thing brands are understanding is, I'm the blogger who's not writing about fashion. I'm not writing about beauty. I'm not writing about gossip. I'm not writing about politics. I'm writing about all of that. I'm the person they can come to if they just want to reach people who care and have their fingers on pop culture.

When working on and writing a film, I'm often more of a sponge than other times, aware of what's going on around me.

I find that male directors are more interested in what the film looks like as opposed to what the film is about emotionally. My job is not to make the film look pretty, and I don't feel drawn to making myself look pretty within the film.

I'm very troubled when editors oblige their film critics to read the novel before they see the film. Reading the book right before you see the film will almost certainly ruin the film for you.

My last experience of film-making was Tickets, a three-episode film in Italy, the third of which is directed by myself. It's not for me to judge whether it's a good film or a bad film, but what I could say is that nobody had a cultural or linguistic issue with what was produced.

With the right movie, 3D can enhance the experience. Absolutely, it can make a good film a great film. It can make a great film a really amazing film to see .

Film is so much to do with perfection and how differently you can feel about someone at the beginning of the film and the end of the film.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist

Now I'm doing a film festival for kids and writing a script about a kidnapped journalist in Afghanistan.

It's not often I get to do a film that turns out good. Plus, there just aren't that many great directors out there. There are a thousand different decisions that need to be made with each script and it's the good directors that can make those decisions. It's a long and complicated process in regards to what looks good on paper. Working on a bad film can be fun too. It can be a good exercise that gets you writing.

I did New York, I Love You which is a very personal film for me. My most personal film, but it's not like a film I've ever made. I would never do that film as a feature, for instance, because it's not very commercial of an idea.

I'd like to do an action film, a full-on comedy film, family dramas and a soulful romantic film.

I didn't start out my directorial career with a dance film, as I knew people thought a choreographer will easily make a dance film. And even with a non-dance film, I had delivered a successful film.

There's a whole gamut of things to do with film music that don't apply when you're making a record or if you're writing a concert piece or something.

When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have to do.

Whether it's acting, directing or writing, I want to be involved in the film industry for the rest of my life.

I want to write a film. I need to think of the right idea and focus on that; I love writing.

I started off writing TV adverts. I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film.

Writing a comedy track is an art. It isn't as easy as people think. It can make or break a film.

I was never interested in acting on film or in television, but I was always more inclined to writing and directing, and the exploration of character.

I prefer live musicians whenever possible. And I tailor the ensemble to what is appropriate for the film and the score I'm writing.

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.

You choose the film, and then the film chooses everyone else; a film decides everything on its own.

It's very hard to write music for a film because you're writing about somebody else's experience.

With The Exorcist we said what we wanted to say. Neither one of us view it as a horror film. We view it as a film about the mysteries of faith. It's easier for people to call it a horror film. Or a great horror film. Or the greatest horror film ever made. Whenever I see that, I feel a great distance from it.

When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment.

I made films with my brothers and my cousins and if any of the films ever come to fruition my career will be in ruins because the acting, writing, and directing is so unbelievably, heinously bad. We once screened one for my grandfather, this film that we had painstakingly made over a couple of days when we were all 10 years old, and he sat there and he said, "This is the worst film I've ever seen." No sympathy whatsoever.

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.

A film is one small voice among other large ones. The film is a tiny part of the discourse. You do what you can but under no illusions of what a film can do.

The biggest misconception about me is perhaps that I film all the time and film everything randomly. The truth is I film very little and always when something excites me and seems to mean something for the film.

Silence Of The Lambs? is a ?fantastic? film. It's a horror film, and it's an incredibly well-told film that is about point of view in such a unique way. The way that film is shot, the way the eyelines are so close, if not directly into camera, betrays an intimacy with the characters and the audience.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

That's such a big part of film scoring that people don't realize. There's a portion of film scoring that's writing the music, but a lot of it is how do you get along with the guy you're working with, how do you interpret what he wants? It's so subjective, you know? Your version of sad is probably different than my version of sad. It's my job to figure out what your vision of sad looks like.

When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film.

I am doing what I want to. It doesn't matter if it is a Karan Johar film or a regional film or a short film.

Personally speaking there's only so long you can go from film to film to film. There's an inspiration an actor gets from the stage.

As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.

Writing and directing your own film, for me, has been the best experience of my life.

'Just' writing is every bit as important as any other creative part of a film.

I do think reading is the best practice for writing, along with writing all the time. I actually never liked writing on my own or in school until I'd had my blog for a while and realized I'd been writing every day for years.

In the case of my second film The Fish Child (El Niño Pez), I had written the novel about 5 years before I made into a film. In the case of The German Doctor I had published the novel a year before I started writing the script, I even had another project to shoot. But I had this idea of the powerful cinematic language from the novel that I couldn't let go of.

"Bruce" was an Eddie Murphy film, so there was a whole different vibe, working on that film, as opposed to working on a [Adam] Sandler film, which I'd done a few of. First of all, there were tons of kids running around. I'm surprised I ever had a kid after doing that film.

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.

I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew.

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.

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

Talent has no gender. People are hiring young male directors right out of film school, off of a student film or off of a film at Sundance for millions of dollars. You can do the same with a female. It's not a risk about the work if you respect the film that they made.

I am an actress. My first film was a Telugu film, my second film was Bollywood, and third was Indo-Chinese.

When you're writing a feature film, the moment you begin Page 1, you are in a sweat that you're running out of pages.

When I wrote Wakolda at first I wasn't conscious that I was writing about something so close to or that had so many similar elements with XXY. It was just after I was done writing that I noticed it. I think both teenagers in each film have many similarities, and Mengele is the extreme version of the plastic surgeon in XXY. Both stories definitely have several ideas connecting them.

Whenever the protagonist of the film becomes bigger than the hero of the film, the film is bound to become a hit.

Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.

A novel compared to film writing can allow the author to be more indulgent, and that extends to the characters and the story being told.