Writers would hate me saying this, and I love words, but I have to say that cinema exists, on one level, for the power of the big image and what that image does.
Y’know, even in a lot of heterosexual cinema it’s always kind of miserable. Love doesn’t work and then, if it does work, it’s suddenly a rom-com.
I love cinema.
The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren’t a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.
French cinema allows women to look… a certain way and be talented at the same time.
I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.
In film you can use images exclusively and narrate a whole story very quickly, but you don’t always so easily find the form in cinema to dig deeper into human thoughts and emotions. And in a novel you can much more easily express a character’s inner thoughts and feelings.
We think of Netflix as a great personalization machine. It understands how you love French midcentury cinema and British murder mysteries, so examples of those pop up in your personalization engine. But you’re also getting fed a lot of Netflix content.
Cannes is the largest festival of world cinema.
You know, comics were created at the same time as the cinema. And the cinema very quickly became a major art. Cartooning didn’t become a major art. There’s a reason for that. People don’t know how to deal with drawings.
I love the idea of thinking of cinema as not that far from music. A lot of my favourite movie makers, the way they move their cameras or the way they cut just feel very musical – even if the movies have no music in them at all.
Even in Indian cinema, there is so much work that I have accepted because I’m comfortable and so much I have declined because I haven’t been comfortable.
I see horror as part of legitimate film. I don’t see it as an independent genre that has nothing to do with the rest of cinema.
In the 80s, parallel cinema gained momentum. So, I got back to films and won National awards for Maqbool’ and other films.
Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color.
I truly believe in cinema’s potential for cultural impact. I have a clear idea what I want to do – to enrich people’s lives.
Manga, as a medium, is very different from cinema. Its creators are free to express themselves with harsh, cruel stories, and they enjoy vast distribution throughout Japan.
I love meeting up with friends and just doing ‘normal’ stuff like going to the cinema.
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
I’ve seen ‘Legend’. I like a different kind of cinema, but when done with conviction, anything looks good.
I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism – where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs – is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we’re talking about. There aren’t many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.
People know that I have a great love for cinema. Not just for commercial cinema, but for the ‘cinema d’auteur.’ But to me, two of the great ‘auteurs’ are actually actors and they both happen to be French. One is Alain Delon and the other is Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Sacramento is where I grew up, so I felt like it had not been given its proper due in cinema.
Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.
I love Bollywood films, but I have been trained in independent cinema.
I can’t watch ‘Titanic’ without breaking down within the first 10 minutes. You know, when it got re-released in 3D, I went to see it again. My mom came to pick me up from the cinema, and I was just bawling my eyes out.
You can lose in cinema too if you don’t put on a good performance.
My production company wasn’t doing well, so we were not producing films. Over a period of time, we have realized that we are going to produce our own films and make cinema that we like. We’ve got so much in-house talent, and my kids are going to be coming, so we all decided that we are going to be in films and cinema.
It was only in the early 1990s – during my student years as an aspiring scientist at Delhi University – that I discovered the world of cinema.
Indian cinema gives you everything that western cinema doesn’t. It’s maseladar and spicy. If you like Indian food, I think you’ll love Indian movies.
Women, especially in rural India, have to undergo such suffering and pain. It is important for our cinema to address their pain, anger, and frustration.
I like it when I go into a cinema and I’m not aware that I’m there; I’m totally involved in the film for two hours.
Certain subjects may no longer be taboo in cinema. But there are ways to treat them that still create shock.
I love films that make me react emotionally and physically when you walk out of the cinema. Two of my favorite films however have got to be ‘The Tree Of Life’ and ‘The Piano Teacher,’ which also stars one of my favourite actresses Isabelle Huppert.
I have always believed that cinema has no language and ‘Dead End’ has proved it so.
I am an emotional and fragile person. I observe life, I am perceptive and can read a person’s body language. I have a strong journalistic streak in me, and had I not been a filmmaker, I would have become a film journalist. I have combined my perceptive and journalistic traits to create my own brand of cinema.
From now on, I approach the cinema as a business woman.
More than an actor, I am a performer… I’m a great believer – honestly so, shamelessly so, vulgarly so – that cinema is for entertainment. If you want to send messages, there’s the postal service.
Nothing will ever top ‘The Wire.’ It was historical. It was black cinema.
Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there’s almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
When I was ten, I had a weird cinema party where I invited everyone from my street to come. I pretended I was an usher and tried to sell them all popcorn.
I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early ’60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them.
For a long time I have compared cinema to music, I think cinema has a lot to do with the rhythm of music.
I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‘Man of Tai Chi’ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.
When you’re working in cinema, you often have a very, very compressed schedule – very few weeks to just kind of go through that whole process of reflection and refining – and it has to be done.
Event cinema is what it is, and I understand why it’s successful. It started with things like ‘Jaws,’ which are extraordinary movies. But what we’ve lost are great character films which are beautifully directed and had great movie stars in them. Films that were about something rather than about spectacle.
I don’t see a full-fledged career in Hollywood. I am happy with the cameos. Even Tom Cruise will only do special appearances in our films; he wouldn’t do a full hero movie. But it’s good to act in different cinema.
The anti-Japanese resistance was as familiar a theme in North Korean cinema as cowboys and Indians was in early Hollywood.
In Mumbai, it’s almost like Hollywood. They can appeal to different segments and still be successful. There are multiplex audiences to whom you can showcase any lifestyle. But in Tamil cinema, we need to satisfy everybody, whether urban or rural.
It’s much better to write a book and stick to the research – that’s history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.
One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.
Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second.
It’s cool for me because I’m a director, but I’m also a teacher. I’m a lover of cinema, and I love working with people who are hungry and have the energy to really do better work.
Narrative cinema is just an imitation of life. Why would you prevent yourself and the audience of the same images, of the same that happened in real life?
They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director’s imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.
