Quotes by Film Directors - Page 2

My luck was my father not striking oil... we'd have been rich. I'd never have set out for Hollywood with my camera and I'd have had a lot less interesting life.
King Vidor
Every failure made me more confident. Because I wanted even more to achieve things as revenge. To show that I could.
Roman Polanski
Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
Paul Newman
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does straight to our emotions deep into the twilight room of the soul.
Ingmar Bergman
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
Alfred Hitchcock
Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.
Richard Lester
Happiness is a beautiful fruit that tastes of cruelty.
Agnes Varda
Do the words 'human rights' even exist in this country anymore?
Mamoru Oshii
You know what happens to me!
Satoshi Kon
Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry.
Akira Kurosawa
It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe’s ‘saturation reporting’ was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos.
David Cronenberg
Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.
Paul Newman
I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public.
George Lucas
Film is one if three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.
Frank Capra
Then the movie started. It was in a foreign language and had subtitles, which was fun because I had never read a movie before.
Stephen Chbosky
Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.
David Fincher
Moving provides meaning for our humble (if still vicious) life of four-dimensional existence. Four-dimensional existence makes the frightening fox hunt into an entertainment, or war into a pastime or a sport. Even when evil is dull and monotonous, there tends to be a lot of movement, action and entertainment involved. Maybe movies are evil.
Gus Van Sant
Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves.
George Miller
The picture's over. Now I have to go and put it on film.
Alfred Hitchcock
Abaratians are very much about living in the moment; living life because that's what we've got, we've got today, we've got now, we've got being alive now and we have to be awake and alive in the moment and not asleep in our lives. And they would find the idea of sleeping through your life, of being bored - they would think that was very stupid - why would you be bored when there's so much to do and so much to see and so much to be?
Clive Barker
Math has never made any sense to me.
Stephen Chbosky
It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him."Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her."It takes a man with real heart"—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
Clive Barker
Sam looked at me soft. And she hugged me. And I closed my eyes because I wanted to know nothing but her arms.
Stephen Chbosky
Then, I started running. And everything was as good as it could be.
Stephen Chbosky
I also remember being struck by de Sade's will, in which he asked that his ashes be scattered to the four corners of the earth in the hope that humankind would forget both his writings and his name. I'd like to be able to make that demand; commemorative ceremonies are not only false but dangerous, as are all statues of famous men. Long live forgetfulness, I've always said—the only dignity I see is in oblivion.
Luis Buñuel
If you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate.
Werner Herzog
The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.
Banksy
Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change.
Federico Fellini
The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself.
Mike Figgis
In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.
Sidney Lumet
The varying physical characteristics of the actors may also necessitate changes. Sean Connery is six feet four. Dustin Hoffman isn't.
Sidney Lumet
Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
Robert Bresson
You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.
Stanley Kubrick
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
Billy Wilder
I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do.
David Cronenberg
But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
François Truffaut
Didn't open the box? What was it last time? Didn't know what it was? And yet we do keep finding each other, don't we? - Cenobite
Clive Barker
For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.
Werner Herzog
What is this film (Mirror) about?It is about a Man. No, not the particular man whose voice we hear from behind the screen, played by Innokentiy Smoktunovsky. It's a film about you, your father, your grandfather, about someone who will live after you and who is still "you". About a Man who lives on the earth, is a part of the earth and the earth is a part of him, about the fact that a man is answerable for his life both to the past and to the future. You have to watch this film simply, and listen to the music of Bach and the poems of Arseniy Tarkovsky; watch it as one watches the stars, or the sea, as one admires a landscape. There is no mathematical logic here, for it cannot explain what man is or what is the meaning of his life. (Sculpting in Time)
andrey tarkovsky
Toni, you bring me luck. I'm gonna wear you like a charm.
Robert Rossen
But he meant beauty in the sense of its organic connection to the material. And this is the connection that, for me, separates true stylists from decorators. The decorators are easy to recognize. That's why critics love them so.
Sidney Lumet
I leave this as a declaration of intent, so no one will be confused. One: "Si vis pacem, para bellum." Latin. Boot Camp Sergeant made us recite it like a prayer. "Si vis pacem, para bellum - If you want peace, prepare for war." Two: Frank Castle is dead. He died with his family. Three: in certain extreme situations, the law is inadequate. In order to shame its inadequacy, it is necessary to act outside the law. To pursue... natural justice. This is not vengeance. Revenge is not a valid motive, it's an emotional response. No, not vengeance. Punishment.
Jonathan Hensleigh
To think you cannot fight fate is only an act of surrender.
John Duigan
Down the steps,...over the corpses,...careers the pram with the child.
Sergei Eisenstein
But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.
Akira Kurosawa
A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.
Andrei Tarkovsky
A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.
Jean Renoir
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way.Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.
Robert Bresson
It's tough, man. Unless it's a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, that's all the studios are even doing. They've kind of admitted they're not in the business of doing anything else. The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boom, you're out of the league, you're done.
Richard Linklater
I'm sure anyone who likes a good crime, provided it is not the victim.
Alfred Hitchcock
We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Film lovers are sick people.
François Truffaut
When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part.What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?
Andrei Tarkovsky
I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
Peter Greenaway
Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?
Werner Herzog
i've always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.
Jean-Luc Godard