The term ‘new queer cinema’ and the films of mine that were associated with that term are from a very, very different time, one almost entirely defined by the AIDS era. It was a very different social and cultural regard for the lives, the experiences, the worth of gay people.
For seven years, I made films in the cinema verite tradition – photographing what was happening without manipulating it. Then I realised I wanted to make things happen for myself, through feature films.
I’m a late bloomer. Even in high school, everyone else was charging ahead, and I didn’t come into my own until very late. I feel that’s true in cinema, too. I didn’t even start ‘Metropolitan’ until I was 37.
I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you’re basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you’re creating a song or a narrative out of it.
Picnic at Hanging Rock’ is the exemplary study of disapparition in cinema – I know of no other major film which deals with unexplained disappearance.
I never got in this business, in cinema, to make horror movies. They arrived on my doorstep and I got typecast. Which was fine, I enjoy it, but I got into this business to make westerns. And the kind of westerns I used to see, they died. So that didn’t work out.
I go for a couple of parties; you won’t find me at every film party and never at award ceremonies. I tried attending for the first three to four years, and I’ve performed at award shows. I sat in them, and I’ve also exited pretty fast from them. It’s just not my place. I’d rather get their adulation in a cinema hall.
Film festivals should also show commercial films along with parallel cinema. This is the only way that it could reach out to more people.
Thanks to ‘Eega,’ people respect me as actor. That abundance of respect is what pulls me towards cinema.
Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.
It’s the golden age of French cinema again but it’s because Sarkozy had the guts to push through copyright law.
And Twin Peaks, the Film is the craziest film in the history of cinema. I have no idea what happened, I have no idea what I saw, all I know is that I left the theater floating six feet above the ground.
When I go to the cinema I watch all different kinds of films.
I always had that long-term vision. Even getting going with cinema, knowing it was such a long road to be able to make films, but I always had a long term. Whenever I was starting out, I had that patience.
I feel very proud that we have managed to stay together. In these forty years we have made forty-six films. Each one has brought a certain name and contribution to cinema.
Even in the realest American cinema that I see, there’s still not that sense that this is reality. There’s still that sense that you are watching a movie. And hopefully, if we did get our jobs right, that sense disappears when you watch this movie.
Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.
In the early ’90s, when those little art films started coming out, we were introduced to Quentin Tarantino and guys like that, and independent cinema was something that everyone wanted to be a part of.
I don’t want all of American cinema to be big cartoons that are just made to be digested by the entire world.
My mom used to have a lot of European cinema playing in the house, so I’d catch bits and pieces of films.
All of my heroes, like Dali, are people who pioneered various forms of cinema.
I’m totally devoted to ’30s cinema.
Coming from Akkineni family, I could say I was drawn into cinema, but nobody forced me to become an actor.
Instead of watching DVDs at home, I prefer going to the cinema to get the experience.
I was born at a bad time for Spain, but a really good one for cinema.
Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.
Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.
I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.
It was Vikram Bhatt and ‘Raaz’ that got me interested in the medium of cinema. Before that, I was like any other youngster dabbling with various things – modelling, films – without a definite direction or focus. Now that I’m working with all of them, life has come full circle for me.
HD is not forgiving. Once you see your face for the first time in a movie cinema, you run straight to the gym.
Cinema will always remember ‘Life Of Pi.’
I love moments in film where there’s no dialogue, and somebody communicates something with a look that kills you. That’s why I love going to the cinema.
The success of ‘Dhruva’ has given me more satisfaction than any of my previous hits, simply because the audience accepted the film even though it was experimental. I really hope this kind of acceptance makes experimental cinema the new mainstream cinema.
Just telling a story. That’s cinema. It’s not silent, black and white. It’s a simple story that’s well made.
To get noticed, I had to take my films in a space which was much more democratic in terms of cinema – the international film festivals.
In 2008, A.J. Schnack recruited Thom Powers to start the Cinema Eye Honors to recognize the artistry and craft that go into making documentary films.
Korean cinema is very improvisational, and there is a unique power that stems from this.
Let me be very frank. I make films keeping within the mainstream and my cinema is popular cinema. I love it this way.
The essence of cinema is editing. It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.
I assure, the door to politics is never closed. Whatever medium is necessary to reach the masses, I will take that – be it cinema or politics.
I think part of the reason ideas haven’t come in is that the world of cinema is changing so drastically, and in a weird way, feature films I think have become cheap. Everything is kind of throwaway. It’s experienced and then forgotten.
Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
In Mexico, there are good filmmakers, but they didn’t always have the opportunity to show their work. But since ‘Amores Perros,’ many of these filmmakers had the opportunity to show their films, and they have a newfound energy for cinema.
I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn’t like the one, two, three – boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.
I grew up with a deep regard for cinema.
With an award like the Asian Film Awards, we’ve sent a message saying that ‘Asian Cinema is here, it matters, and more importantly, we are all part of the same fraternity!’ The AFA is truly, then, an award for Asia, by Asia.
In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.
On Being John Malkovich and the cinema of the absurd, I do enjoy it. I wish there were more like it. The very fact that there can’t be more like it is one of the reasons it’s admirable.
I saw David Lynch’s ‘The Elephant Man’ when I was 15. I was completely bowled over. I found it so beautiful, strange and mesmerizing that I went back to the cinema every night for a week to see it.
I have always thought that, of all the arts, the cinema is the most complete art.
Although it is a fantasy film, it’s as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth.
I am really not interested in the cinema.
Sometime in your teens you have to decide what you want to do. I knew it had to be cinema.
When it came time to go to university, I wanted to study cinema studies and theater and not necessarily do a fine arts degree.
When I first envisioned ‘Funny Games’ in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
Entertainment today constantly emphasises the message that things are wonderful the way they are. But there is another kind of cinema, which says that change is possible and necessary and it’s up to you.
Cinema is much more than heroes and villains.
I only watch films in the cinema. I’m old fashioned. I’m a lost cause.
I need theatre for my equilibrium, because in theatre the actors don’t care so much about image, about celebrity – you are more independent. There is not the narcissism, maybe, that you find in cinema.
I’m working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words, with material from my own life. I walk through life with my camera, and occasionally I film. I never think about scripts, never think about films, making films.
I can’t remember what the last film I saw was, as I can’t smoke or drink in cinemas.
