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

The shot [in the 1956 film Written on the Wind] with Dorothy Malone walking down the stairs makes all rock videos ever after resemble forgotten, anemic nuns.

The problem lies not with genre but with formula, which consists of seeing genre conventions as restrictions rather than mere guidelines, ends in themselves rather than possibilities.

To show you how much I love you, I’d take you to the moon and back. Or try to fake it in a film studio.

You think you know it, but you always find out new stuff.

We Live in a World Measured by Piracy because Piracy means Access.

Women think in [Douglas] Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think....

we might have to eat the dog” poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald’s was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and...

14 years ago I was born in the shadow of this mountain, given the name Mary Call. – Mary Call in Where the Lilies Bloom.

Kon’s films present a fractured, multifaceted world in which everyone has their own different reality.

It is a quintessential example of the whirling kinetics that drive a Keaton film, in which not just the medium but the human body- the permutations of the sinews, the shock of the limbs -seems...

The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.

I’ve never seen Star Wars or The Godfather, so that would be a good excuse for us to spend a bunch of time together.

Jaws 4 is so bad it makes Jaws 3 look like Jaws 2.

A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.

Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

In this business, until you’re known as a monster, you’re not a star

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical...

And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this “both” shit. “Both” comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. … But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked...

The camera has a mind of its own–its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera’s gaze–the camera’s domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human...

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.

Film is the greatest educational medium the world has ever known.

Can anyone capable of genuinely appreciating Mozart and Mizoguchi possibly say that he is not, in that respect, immeasurably better off than someone whose cultural horizon is limited to bingo and The Black and White...

The sad thing is that when movies like this fail, executives think that proves there’s no audience for unusual, original pictures – because they think they’ve made one.

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...

Your audience is your adversary. If you don’t have one get one – imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination....

Love me for me, not for how much I resemble my clones, or how handsome they are, or how brilliant they are, or how much you want to have sex with all of them, at...

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second

Home is what we know we ought to want but can’t really take. America is not so much a home for anyone as a universal dream of home, a wish whose attraction depends upon its...

A lot of film people are like that– especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them....

…I take photographs and I film my own home movies, I have a darkroom as well… but I can’t be a photojournalist like you… I can’t be anything… still, at least I can take photographs,...

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else’s decision about the final form of something. It’s so hard as to be intolerable.

Over the years, I have been subjected to many indignities, all for the sake of Art. If I ever catch him, I’m going to kill the guy.

The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began...

Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film – another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that...

Hollywood’s Studio Era was part of a Golden Age because it didn’t need profanity (unlike reality-television today)

In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of...

Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, madam. And one can’t be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed you are....

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.

Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited...

I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in power. This snuff-movie opens with a plenary session of the Ba’ath Party central committee: perhaps a...

Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!

Cinema is a mixed form. L’Avventura has characters, it has social context, and these things are not trivial. Its plot is the disappearance of a disappearance. Possibly the most frightening plot imaginable. Forgetting the dead,...

That’s the greatest sin a director can commit; to make a film simply because he wants to make a film.

The film libraries on some of these channels.” Elmina said. “I swear. There was one on last night. I couldn’t sleep. After I saw, it, I was afraid ro sleep. Have you seen Black Narcissus,...

We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas...

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

Creativity is a gift each one of us is born with, irrespective of our backgrounds and entitlement of culture, The challenge is to hold onto this gift as we go through life. To nurture it....

I have no rules. For me, it’s a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You’re looking...

… Play the age as comedy if you want to get away with murder.