Cinema is a thankless industry where sometimes to appear on the cinematic scenery is a thing for late bloomers and people who are very patient. The places are accounted, and the space is often unwelcoming. Money is rare, and independent voices are muted by the almost complete absence of risk takers.
My theory is, I don’t know how long it’s going to be, five or ten years, there will be only two ways to see a movie, and that will either be on your computer through your TV screen or in the cinema, end of story. There will be no DVD; that’s it – simple.
Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.
I think the long-term effect of video on cinema is good in that what we are now getting up there on the screen is of superior quality. Videos are just so much more sensitive to the world.
I’m a lover of cinema, and I don’t want that to completely expire.
The choice of films I make is directly proportional to the kind of cinema I have grew up watching.
I’ve been very lucky in my long life. On three continents, in diverse cultures, through happy moments, not-so-happy moments, and moments as marvelous as this one, I’ve had the privilege of working with the cinema’s greatest masters.
I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question ‘why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?’
Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It’s something I really like. I like movies.
There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don’t. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.
I think American cinema, particularly, has become so disposable. It’s not even cinema, It’s just moviemaking.
Personally, I don’t give a toss about French viewers. I make films for foreigners – it’s a bit like Ken Loach, who’s not very popular in England but has had a lot of success in France. Cinema is always an experience in a foreign body.
If I’m in theatre, cinema doesn’t even cross my mind. Similarly when I’m making a film, theatre doesn’t cross my mind.
My mother is a very big cinema buff, so as a kid, we watched a lot of Indian and Malay films.
The convergence of the Rhone and Saone. Paul Bocuse. The birthplace of cinema. Chateauneuf-du-Pape just a few miles down the road. It does not get much better than Lyon.
Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.
Nevertheless, in the theatre, and in the cinema, the contemporary reality of Poland has been represented only to a minuscule degree in the last 12 years.
Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.
I really believed that Batman had the potential to be one of the coolest guys in cinema.
I’m not naive enough to pretend that on its own cinema can capture the very soul of significant social and cultural problems.
I still don’t feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic language. You can’t separate one from the other.
I’d love for Samantha to continue acting after our marriage. She has worked hard to achieve her stardom. Unlike me, she had no family empire to back her career in Telugu cinema.
The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.
The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature.
The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief – call it what you will – than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor-bicycle and golf course.
Cinema dominated the Fife coalfield towns. We lived in Lochgelly, but my mum was caught up in Hollywood. She was in love with the style and glamour. Sometimes she would come with me to the cinema in the afternoons, and she would say things like, ‘I wouldn’t mind a peck with Gregory.’
I wanted to make a film – and I’ve been wanting to do this for 16 years – about life in care, and bring it to the public’s attention, because I had never seen anything, on TV or in the cinema, which said: ‘This is how it feels to be a kid in care’.
In Australia, there aren’t a lot of people committed to art, so these communities form that are dedicated to music, theater, cinema, but they’re very small. So, they tend to move ahead on the power of collaboration, enthusiasm and creativity.
‘Independent’ means one thing to me: It means that regardless of the source of financing, the director’s voice is extremely present. It’s such a pretentious term, but it’s auteurist cinema. Director-driven, personal, auteurist… Whatever word you want.
Sadly, cinemas with film as the primary source are disappearing. We need to remain open to change. That does not require one to divorce the past but to respect and process both the present and the future.
The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life.
Parallel cinema has not made an effort to communicate in a language the other person understands.
The secret of success in cinema lies in not just being talented but showcasing your talent to the audience. And, that happens only when you get the right films and directors.
She was obsessed with French and Swedish cinema. I also remember our mother showing us ‘Gone With the Wind’ very early on. She absolutely loved Vivien Leigh, so it must have been a formative experience for me, thinking, ‘Oh, maybe one day I’ll be like Vivien Leigh.’
I’ve spent days in cinemas answering questions from the audience, in interviews, travelling abroad, and all they do is thank me nicely.
I’m a great candidate for why arts funding shouldn’t be cut, because I had no experience other than what was at school, I’m from a working-class town, there were no theaters, and the cinema closed when I was a kid. Anything that gave me a voice or a way to express myself I went running headlong toward.
The cinema should be human and be part of people’s lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me.
My children are as at home in the Port Elgin library as I used to be, and they’ve sat in the cinema seats where I sat with their aunt every Saturday afternoon, watching the matinee movies.
‘The Look of Silence’ is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It’s distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council.
When I started making movies, I was pretty young, and at the time I felt like there needed to be more confrontation in cinema – or I needed to make something more disruptive – so in the beginning, those movies were me wanting to play with the rules.
I’ve never done a film before where every single person in the audience knows the ending. I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days. People are blogging your endings from their cinema seats.
I don’t start a film with the heroine but with the cinema subject. If there is a woman in the story, she has to be of a particular type. It’s not as if I start with Madhuri Dixit and then think what kind of film.
Since I was a baby my goal was to be on TV because film was just impossible – you never got any Asian women in Western cinema. I grew up wanting to be in ‘East-Enders’ because film wasn’t even a dream. The community were very much like, ‘How can you want to act? It’s such a low-class profession.’
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
I’m one of those directors who read reviews, even if they’re bad, because I started as a film critic as a cinema student. I indulge in the art of criticism in general.
When you’re so passionate about cinema, the idea to direct your own film is really appealing.
You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.
I’d wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.
Because there is so little room for expression otherwise, a lot of people love cinema because they find it a way of expressing themselves.
Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don’t manage that – but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.
For me, as an actor, there is no commercial or independent or art cinema. For me, it’s a character that is given by the director. And it is a task for me that I have to fulfill it to the best of my ability regardless of the kind of film that it is.
A lot of cinema is about the game of authenticity – do you feel it’s real?
What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do.
