Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Film / Filmmaking / Movies.
Drama is life with the dull parts cut out of it.
Alfred Hitchcock
Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.
For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.
It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, They lived happily ever after and the following quarter-century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know it just might work.
Nora Ephron
A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
Virginia Woolf
The cinema, like the detective story, enables us to experience without danger to ourselves all the excitements, passions, and fantasies which have to be repressed in a humanistic age.
Carl Gustav Jung
Mayakovsky has an essay called How to Write Poems where he says that a poet must spend time and effort choosing the uniquely appropriate words, force them into the rhythm of the poem and then test it out loud ten times or more. Vertov did something very similar at the editing table. A hundred tests, a thousand different variants, endless numbers of try-outs--for meaning, for imagery, for rhythm--and finally, after long intensive efforts, that feeling of joy: it works. . .
Elizaveta Svilova
I am the camera's eye. I am the machine that shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today I am forevcr free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. I approach and draw away from things--I crawl under them--I climb on them--I am on the head of a galloping horse
Dziga Vertov, source indicated:
All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance.
Francois Truffaut
Damn right, it's fun. There's good company. It's creative. It's adventurous. Combines high adventure and art with intellection. It's more fun than polo. It's like going undefeated in football. When asked if making movies is fun
Tommy Lee Jones
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
Charlie Chaplin
I guess I think that films have to be made totally by fascists -- there's no room for democracy in making film.
Don Alan Pennebaker
The words Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.
Pauline Kael
Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them -- as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
Ben Hecht
I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.
I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.
Sam Shepard
If I'd have gone to art school, or stayed in anthropology, I probably would have ended up back in film ... Mostly I just followed my inner feelings and passions ... and kept going to where it got warmer and warmer, until it finally got hot ... Everybody has talent. It's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is.
George Lucas
The people are unreal. The flowers are unreal, they don't smell. The food is unreal, it doesn't taste of anything. The whole place is a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set, built up in the desert.
Ethel Barrymore, on first arrivi
There is no more interesting place in the world to meet characters than a movie set. If you have lost anybody anywhere and don
Will Rogers
If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema.
Serge Daney
