Quotes by Film Directors - Page 5

This revolution is for display purposes only.
Banksy
Mentors have a way of seeing more of our faults that we would like. It's the only way we grow.
George Lucas
Our specialty was exasperated dignity and the discombombulation of Authority.
Mack Sennett
Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon.
David Cronenberg
Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.
Stephen Chbosky
I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.
Richard Linklater
Not anyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
Jan Pinkava Ratatouille
An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.
Federico Fellini
Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be... I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.
Andrei Tarkovsky
At some point, you're no longer growing up, you're aging. But no one can pinpoint that moment exactly.
Richard Linklater
Like it or not, a caterpillar must first live as a chrysalis before becoming a butterfly. Maybe I remember those days because I am going through a chrysalis stage.
Isao Takahata
Life has a funny way of turning you into the one thing you don't want to be.
Jonathan Levine
We are the eyes in the darkness
Mladen Đorđević
Let’s prioritise here. At the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t going to be easy. We need to find Norma as fast as we can, avoid the powerful demon that wants me as his slave, and then get the fuck out of Hell. I’m sure we’ll encounter some heinous, unthinkable, soul-scarring shit along the way, but hopefully we make it out alive.
Clive Barker
The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.
Jean Renoir
One man's pornography is another man's theology.
Clive Barker
Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made.
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Art is by nature aristocratic, and naturally selective in its effect on the audience. For even in its 'collective' manifestations, like theatre or cinema, its effect is bound up with the intimate emotions of each person who comes into contact with a work. The more the individual is traumatised and gripped by these emotions, the more significant a place will the work have in his experience.The aristocratic nature of art, however does not in any way absolve the artist of his responsibility to his public and even, if you like, more broadly, to people in general. On the contrary, because of his special awareness of his time and of the world in which he lives, the artist becomes the voice of those who cannot formulate or express their view of reality. In that sense the artist is indeed vox populi. That is why he is called to serve his own talent, which means serving his people.
Andrei Tarkovsky
I know that things get worse before they get better because that's what my psychiatrist says, but this is a worse that feels too big.
Stephen Chbosky
In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
Alfred Hitchcock
(...) a director should tell a story that is close to his own existential experience.
Andrzej Wajda
Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
Jean-Luc Godard
Our modern world defined God as a ‘religious complex’ and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED. Then, through the laughter came the shattering thunder of the World War. And now a blood-drenched, bitter world — no longer laughing — cries for a way out. There is but one way out. It existed before it was engraven upon Tablets of Stone. It will exist when stone has crumbled. The Ten Commandments are not rules to obey as a personal favor to God. They are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together. They are not laws — they are The Law.
Cecil B. DeMille
My main problem with cops is that they do what they're told. They say 'Sorry mate, I'm just doing my job' all the fucking time.
Banksy
There are two Newman's laws. The first one is "It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down." The second is "Just when things look darkest, they go black.
Paul Newman
I've never really understood why people sleep. Wasting a third of your life and becoming vulnerable for almost 8 hours every night. Doesn't seem very appealing to me.
Banksy
Those with a moral deficit put on a good show, and sleep like a baby.
Paul Newman
Put my head under my pillow, and let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.
Stephen Chbosky
I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.
Stephen Chbosky
What moved me was the theme of the harmony which is born only of sacrifice, the twofold experience of love. It's not a question of mutual love: what nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment, it is nothing.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Most people say about graveyards: "Oh, it's just a bunch of dead people. It's creepy." But for me, there's an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it.
Tim Burton
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Christopher Nolan The Dark Knight
Say this one time with me: "Would you like that in a pump or a loafer?"... Good. Now memorize it, because starting tomorrow, the only job that you're going to be able to get is selling SHOES!
George Huang
The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessy happy, weren't they? To Kristy this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn't blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.
Clive Barker
As to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn’t spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly.
Clive Barker
Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful because we're too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.
Steven Spielberg
Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it's inevitable that it should come home to roost.
David Cronenberg
I was aware that I was taking inordinate pleasure in small, technological events and objects, and that this was probably a semiconscious tactic meant to evade confronting certain agonizing life events which were probably not resolvable and were destined to cause unrelenting pain and distress; yet the pleasure was real, and I took it greedily.
David Cronenberg
Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.
Laurie Anderson
Behold those times re-created bythe brutal power of sunlit images,the light of life’s tragedy.The walls of the trial, the fieldof the firing squad; and the distantghost of Rome’s suburbs in a ring,gleaming white in naked light.Gunshots: our death, our survival.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
You are both stars, don’t forget.When the stars exploded billions ofyears ago, they formed everythingthat is this world. The moon, thetrees, everything we know isstardust. So don’t forget. Youare stardust.- ROSE PEDDLER
Richard Linklater
We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.
Paul Newman
You don't get it boy... this isn't a mudhole... its an operating table. (KRAKKKKK) And I'm the surgeon.
Frank Miller
The purpose of bayonet training is to awaken your killer instincts. The killer instinct will make you strong. If the meek ever inherit the earth the strong will take it away from them. The weak exist to be devoured by the strong. Every Marine must pack his own gear. Every Marine must be the instrument of his own salvation.
Stanley Kubrick
Marv's a guy you've got to be careful around. He doesn't mean any harm, but he causes plenty.
Frank Miller
As an artist you look into yourself to understand the human potential to be all kinds of things that are not necessarily pleasant but are real - a criminal, a murderer, a sadist, a rapist; to be all of these things that many people are. You can't allow yourself to say, 'I'm a different species from those people.' Because you aren't.The criminal as monster is kind of common. That's very convenient because you can then say, 'Of course I'm not a monster, therefore I'm not a criminal therefore I have no potential in tern of criminality.' And that lets you off the hook. That gives you a nice wall between yourself and them.
David Cronenberg
He's clearly a man with a mission, but it's not one of vengeance. Bruce is not after personal revenge ... He's much bigger than that; he's much more noble than that. He wants the world to be a better place, where a young Bruce Wayne would not be a victim ... In a way, he's out to make himself unnecessary. Batman is a hero who wishes he didn't have to exist.
Frank Miller
One will probably have to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)
Ingmar Bergman
I don't like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older... I am very resistant to anything that keeps me away from the business of making these journeys into the fantastique. They are my reason for being on the planet, as far as I can comprehend, and I pursue them to the cost of almost anything.
Clive Barker
There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... Perhaps...
Jean-Pierre Melville
I, too, head for the Baths of Caracalla,thinking—with my old, magnificentprivilege of thinking…(And let there still be a god in me that thinks,lost, weak, and childish,yet whose voice is so humanit is almost a song.) Oh, to leavethis prison of poverty!To be free of the yearningthat makes these ancient nights so splendid!He who knows yearning, and he who does not,have something in common: man’s desires are humble.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.
Stanley Kubrick
Peter Pan has to be the book of my childhood. Come to think of it, it's the book of my adulthood too. It's a book which, in the reading of it, takes me back to editions that I've had and lost, with various illustrators' work in them. It brings back moments sitting reading it with my mother. It brings back my first contact with the Disney cartoon. It brings back standing in the play-yard when I was a kid, when the wind was really blowing, and closing my eyes, spreading my arms and pretending I could fly. It brings back childhood dreams of flying. It brings back the first encounter I ever had with an invented world... Never Never Land was really the first journey I took to an invented world which I believed in wholly and completely. I remember the immense solidarity that I felt with the Lost Boys, with Peter, with the Indians - how much I wanted to be a Red Indian - how much the saving of Tiger Lily meant to me as a kid, how much I wanted to one day wake up and save an Indian squaw from drowning.
Clive Barker
No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.
Federico Fellini
...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.
Andrei Tarkovsky
I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.
Ingmar Bergman
We survive, in the confusionof a life reborn beyond reason.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
FLETCHER: The truth is I don’t think people understand what it is I did at Shaffer. I wasn’t there to conduct. Any idiot can move his hands and keep people in tempo. No, it’s about pushing people beyond what’s expected of them. And I believe that is a necessity. Because without it you’re depriving the world of its next Armstrong. Its next Parker. Why did Charlie Parker become Charlie Parker, Andrew? ANDREW: Because Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him.FLETCHER: Exactly. Young kid, pretty good on the sax, goes up to play his solo in a cutting session, fucks up -- and Jones comes this close to slicing his head off for it. He’s laughed off-stage. Cries himself to sleep that night. But the next morning, what does he do? He practices. And practices and practices. With one goal in mind: that he never ever be laughed off-stage again. A year later he goes back to the Reno, and he plays the best motherfucking solo the world had ever heard. Now imagine if Jones had just patted young Charlie on the head and said “Good job.” Charlie would’ve said to himself, “Well, shit, I did do a good job,” and that’d be that. No Bird. Tragedy, right? Except that’s just what people today want. The Shaffer Conservatories of the world, they want sugar. You don’t even say “cutting session” anymore, do you? No, you say “jam session”. What the fuck kind of word is that? Jam session? It’s a cutting session, Andrew, this isn’t fucking Smucker’s. It’s about weeding out the best from the worst so that the worst become better than the best. I mean look around you. $25 drinks, mood lighting, a little shrimp cocktail to go with your Coltrane. And people wonder why jazz is dying. Take it from me, and every Starbucks jazz album only proves my point. There are no two words more harmful in the entire English language than “good job”.
Damien Chazelle
When you begin a new story, your job is to envision, to try to glimpse stuff that doesn't as yet exist. That's what writing is, going out to meet the ghosts of the future. Not out of the past, not the ones that are dead and buried. Ghosts of the future, those who don't exist yet.
Cédric Klapisch
I don't know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don't consider, especially if they're young, that the sands of our life have been measured by God unto the last grain and that every carelessly wasted second of love sinks irreversibly into eternity.
Angel Wagenstein