[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 don’t know Bilbo. For Martin to be sitting there playing Bilbo is amazing. He’s going to be amazing, he’s going...

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 wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a...

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

One of the common themes you will read in interview after interview is the call to keep fighting for your vision. This is a message to women directors, producers, writers—anyone who wants to work in the business. Your voice counts. Your vision matters.

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider… To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. – Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre

The varying physical characteristics of the actors may also necessitate changes. Sean Connery is six feet four. Dustin Hoffman isn’t.

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 of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about...

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 us–this is his metaphysical wager–is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of...

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she’d been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She’d gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really – that she realized that there is such a thing...

Detik itu juga aku merasa seolah-olah jantungku diremas. Ah. Inilah sebabnya mengapa aku menyukai film dokumenter.Film dokumenter membuat aku sadar bahawa hidup ini nyata, bahwa dunia yang kutinggali ini tidak sempurna.

People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines.

Kodachrome… it gives us those nice, bright colors,gives us the greens of summers,makes ya think all the world’s a sunny day,Oh yeah!I’ve got a Nikon camera, I’d love to take a photograph,so mama don’t take…my Kodachrome away…

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 from its point of view. Very vital, very excited, really having a good time. It’s really a triumph if you’re...

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 wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like...

There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle… Perhaps…

I would rather be told an R-rated truth than a G-rated lie.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.

It’s tough, man. Unless it’s a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, that’s all the studios are even doing. They’ve kind of admitted they’re not in the business of doing anything else. The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boom, you’re out of the league, you’re done.

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 second time I had a bit more control but was still giddy with excitement. And the third time I...

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 are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by...

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 will compensate by urging restraint. By that same token, someone who bore a glacier within them might urge passionate abandon....

No one could honestly say that a musical makes sense.

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 never changed.

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.

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 National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.

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.

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 she left me.’And he said,’Well, we have to look into that.’And I said, ‘There’s nothing to look into! I wanted...

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 was to express yourself with pictures and sound. But learning to make a movie is totally different.

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 at once, and it’s too much; my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I...

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 volunteer in our communities, as well as the future of our wildlands and wildlife. If the stories they create are...

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 images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist – exactly as happens in a film. And, just as...

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 self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

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.