Film / Filmmaking / Movies Quotes

The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War.''

Herman Wouk, (interview)

The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.

Kenneth Tynan

The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

H. L. Mencken

A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Orson Welles

All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.

Clive James

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

John Berger

Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.

Samuel Goldwyn

A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.

Samuel Goldwyn

I've tried like hell to make bad movies good, and I can't. Maybe Marlon Brando has been able to do that at times. But even he has a hard time making The Appaloosa a good movie.

Dylan McDermott

A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.

David Mamet

We have taken beauty and exchanged it for stilted voices.

D.W. (David Wark) Griffith

You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

Werner Herzog

The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.

Raymond Chandler

The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

Raymond Chandler

People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television -- you don't feel anything.

Andy Warhol

Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.

Samuel Goldwyn

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write, but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.

Will Rogers

Some years ago, writing about stage adaptations of fiction, I noted:

John Simon, Movies Into Film, Di

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

Susan Sontag

I'm gonna do four or five of these movies, and it's going to become my career. I'll have to keep expanding the bat suit, because I get fatter every year. I'll be bankrupt. I'll be out opening shopping malls, going from appearance to appearance in a cheesy van. On playing Batman

Michael Keaton