If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.

I’m not a film buff. I don’t watch a lot of movies.

[on Martin Freeman playing Bilbo Baggins] It was great. I got to hang out with him, and I kept a straight face for a bit and then I started giggling because I know Martin, I...

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you...

Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice…it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous…

To make a real independent film where the filmmaker is in charge creatively, one must sacrifice personal, financial, and physical well-being.

You’re beautful. Yes you are, you’re very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful.

Most of us are searching-consciously or unconsciously- for a degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world, and if we happen to become aware-like Stravinsky- of a volcano within us, we...

No one could honestly say that a musical makes sense.

How may a mortal, face and defeat the Kraken

I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That’s something I want to see again. In terms...

It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.

Here’s the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives...

Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made.

In my experience there are billions of dollars available for pieces of shit. As soon as the material distinguishes itself by something interesting, financing becomes a problem.

photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself…

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the...

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

It’s my conceit that perhaps some diseases perceived as diseases that destroy a well-functioning machine actually turn it into a new but still well-functioning machine with a different purpose. The AIDS virus: look at it...

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman’s head was...

Good film, television, or music keeps you awake, anxious for the next movement or act, and wanting more when it is finished.

Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped.

I broke up with this girl, and they put me with a psychiatrist who said, ‘Why did you get so depressed, and do all those things you did?’ I said, ‘I wanted this girl and...

In order to get [Mean Streets] made I had to learn how to make a movie,” says Scorsese. “I didn’t learn how to make a movie in film school. What you learned in film school...

The first time we did cavalry charge I was so breathless with excitement I nearly fell off the horse. I actually saw stars in front of my eyes and thought I was going to faint....

The dangerous temptation of wildlife films is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models — that we might not need animals in the flesh.

understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you...

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly...

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that’s printed about him.

Down the steps,…over the corpses,…careers the pram with the child.

Observation is a dying art.

It’s me. I chose this. I chose all of this — this rock has been waiting for me my entire life. I’ve been moving towards it my whole life.

To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve...

That’s the illusion of stillness. There is no secret. Only the implication of one by its possesor”.

I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.

We all steal, but if we’re smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.

When everything gets answered, it’s fake.

Film photography will always be superior to digital – because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you’ve got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and...

Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

An actor is just a part of a movie, but director – he is the movie.

Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it’s inevitable that it should come home to roost.

Film lovers are sick people.

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out

Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. The entertainment for this evening is not new, you’ve seen this entertainment through and through you have seen your birth,...

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception… as film is able to do today… And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons,...

Filmmaking is akin to writing on water.

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all...

In this image-driven age, wildlife filmmakers carry a heavy responsibility. They can influence how we think and behave when we’re in nature. They can even influence how we raise our kids, how we vote and...

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...

Well anything thats interesting in a film, or in a character (all your passion, your sex, your anger, your rage, all that) comes from that part of you that you want to hide and push...