‘Moonlight’ is a story that hasn’t been told. Whether placed as queer black cinema or urban male cinema, the lack of coming-of-age films featuring people like Chiron and set in places like inner-city Miami is pronounced and unfortunate.
We can’t keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don’t know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?
I’m not interested in gothic storytelling or the horrific for its own sake. I’m always interested in it as a way of getting at larger ideas or important meaning. And you don’t see that as much as you’d think in the history of horror cinema. A lot of times, it’s scariness for scariness’ own sake.
I bask in the affection I get on the streets. I recently went into the kitchen of a restaurant to meet the cooks. They were people I didn’t know, but what a joy it was meet them! Such experiences wouldn’t happen if I were doing only one kind of cinema.
There’s a difference between watching a film and watching a bit of cinema and enjoying a film as a piece of cinema.
In the U.S., it would be so much better if the studios made many more smaller films for niche markets rather than a few tent pole films that swamp cinemas and Hoover up all the funding.
Anyone who’s made film and knows about the cinema has a lifelong love affair with the experience. You never stop learning about film.
That’s the way life is: meaning is always there, but there is no clearly given way of decoding it. Conventional cinema obscures this with an easy reduction of meaning to plot and schematic characters.
Conventional Indian cinema is about people falling in love. They sing, they dance.
The history of cinema appears to be easy to do, since it is, after all, made up of images; cinema appears to be the only medium where all one has to do is re-project these images so that one can see what has happened.
I am a product of Indian cinema; I’ve grown up watching Indian films ever since I can remember. And song and dance is part of our lives; it’s part of our culture; we wake up to songs, we sleep to lullabies, you know, we celebrate every religious and traditional function with music.
I think starting a cinema career late in life has more advantages than disadvantages.
If, in 2014, we’re still making ‘white savior movies,’ then it’s just lazy and unfortunate. We’ve grown up as a country, and cinema should be able to reflect what’s true. And what’s true is that black people are the center of their own lives and should tell their own stories from their own perspectives.
I think, in terms of activism associated with my films, be it ‘Salaam Baalak Trust’ or ‘Maisha,’ taking the idea of cinema as a way to change people, I feel heartened. I am glad that we have impacted thousands of lives.
I’m under the impression that this notion of decency is disappearing from our society where conflicts are made worse on cinema and on television, where people are nasty and cruel on the Internet and where, in general, everybody seems to be very angry.
With it adult political audiences abandoned cinemas. In their place appeared a void. That previous political audience migrated to the seats in front of their TV.
I would personally not run down any cinema just because I am not capable of making it. Anurag Kashyap makes a certain kind of cinema; I make a different kind. But when we meet, we are friendly.
‘Moonlight’ is a story that hasn’t been told. Whether placed as queer black cinema or urban male cinema, the lack of coming-of-age films featuring people like Chiron and set in places like inner-city Miami is pronounced and unfortunate.
Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.
I didn’t want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. ‘I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.’ I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, ‘This is me! This is me!’
There’s something magical about film, it’s the ultimate for me, because it’s kind of permanent – inasmuch as anything is. When I went to see Buster Keaton when I was about 14 and I came out of the cinema having really laughed at this film which had been made 50 years before, I thought: That’s immortality. It’s fantastic.
It took a while for me to grasp that my colleagues believe I have made an impact on the history of cinema.
I don’t think I can speak of the achievements of Indian cinema because it’s so large next to me. It’s not stopping. It’s ever-growing. We are going towards the right direction. We are evolving as a filmmaking industry as actors, directors, producers, singers, musicians. Everybody just pushing the boundaries.
Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.
Cinema has become a global economy, totally international.
I want to do stories that really move me, that have an audience, and at the end of the day, I want people to feel something when they walk out of the cinema.
Cinema is arguably the 20th century’s most influential art form.
Never in the history of cinema has a medium entertained an audience. It’s what you do with the medium.
Cinema explains American society. It’s like a Western, with good guys and bad guys, where the weak don’t have a place.
‘Napoleon’ is pure cinema, and cinema was designed for sharing.
I think cricket and cinema are two big entities in the country. If you are part of either, you are sorted.
Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema.
The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
I tried to sing ‘What’s Going On’ with Amy Winehouse once at an old cinema in the West End. There was a funk band that had members of both of our bands playing in it, but it was the worst kind of place to sing bad karaoke because everyone there was an amazing singer or musician.
The film industry has been extremely welcoming to me. It’s an industry which is biased to what they think is talent. If they think you can bring value to cinema, they’ll support you.
I don’t think Bollywood is only mindless cinema, but a lot of films they churn out are not films that I completely enjoy watching.
I am happy with my family and my colleagues and want to continue making my own kind of cinema. I have never belonged to any camp and have no friends in the industry. Most of them will pay lip service, but when it comes to doing, they tend to shy away.
We need women in cinema to know first that they have a safe space to open up about their struggles without being judged and marginalised.
I was lucky to start working when German cinema was having an interesting moment. Now the quality is going downhill again because they’re insisting on doing comedies. We should know by now that we make good cars but we’re not the funniest people.
Music was the only voice of cinema for a very long time before we had sound; it’s organically linked to cinema itself.
I want to figure out what comes after cinema as the gold standard for storytelling.
My plays are always pushing towards cinema anyway. They’re down and dirty, real and more fun.
In L.A., cinema and television might be seen as more interesting places for architecture than ever before.
The big French movie distributors are the Trojan horse of the American cinema.
Folk tales, fairy tales, religion, the occult – these are the things I’m most passionate about, even more than cinema. And I’m very passionate about cinema.
I’ve always been a fan of Korean cinema but never really pursued it, as I wanted to pave my way here in the States. I figured, once I established myself here, Korea might take notice. And it did.
From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.
I suppose I was interested in creating a vision; in the same way, I was very drawn to tension within cinema. Hitchcock was my other early obsession – ‘Psycho’ and its score. So there was the sense of trying to create an atmosphere: how a sound resonates and makes an effect.
Used properly, cinema is the coolest thing in the world.
I was studying English, as you will, in the day, and five nights a week, I would be at the cinema. That continued throughout my 20s, which was also the 1980s – there was a lot of really good films coming out then.
When I write, I keep the family audience in mind. I ensure there’s no vulgarity, as families are coming into the theatres, and there’s no blood and gore because of the kids. There is a set of people who doesn’t like my cinema, but there’s a bigger group that likes the kind of movies I make.
When you think after 25 years of Mao, Chinese people had no idea about western music or even western culture. They had no idea about James Dean or the Beatles or Charlie Chaplin, modern music or modern cinema.
In Iranian cinema, all the lying takes place before making the film. In order to be able to make the film, you have to lie.
Cinema has a large scope as it is a mirror of society and with the mindset changing, people are taking it more seriously.
