Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?
I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn't want me to create a guy who is mortal.
It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.
We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.
I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.
There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.'.
The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.
If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.
Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.
If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?
I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.
I'm sorry - you know, culture is elitist. Culture has to be elitist: it's about seeing and knowing and about knowledge.
I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.
A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.
All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil.
I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.
The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taup.
That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.
Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.
I believe that cinema died on the 31 September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living rooms of the world.
I do feel for me that cinema has somehow ceased to be a spectator sport. I get tremendous excitement out of making it rather than watching it.
My heroes among filmmakers would be people like Buñuel and Pasolini, who were of very high cinematic intelligence, but tread on a lot of toes.
As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.
There's more religion in my little finger than there is in the pope. But no, I don't believe in God. I am an athiest. A Darwinian evolutionist.
Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.
If you think about it, most cinema is built along 19th-century models. You would hardly think that the cinema had discovered James Joyce sometimes.
A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.
Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth.
Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?
I think my films are very English. That certain emotional distance, interest in the world, interest in irony. These are all deeply English propositions.
We have more than enough deodorised, over-the-top, sentimental cinema. Let's try to bring a little human intelligence into things. It can be very rewarding.
If you never lived out your sexuality - it's a great force, and if you try to fight it, what does that create? Energy: positive and negative, self-loathing.
Some people would say again that my attitudes are cold and cerebral; I suppose if you're thinking about American sentimental movies, I suppose they would be.
I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.
Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?
I was continually connected with the whole world and never got any rest. At the moment, I spend only a few hours weekly on the net, that's just better for me.
I think there is no future whatsoever in 3D. It does nothing to the grammar and syntax or vocabulary of cinema. And you get fed up with it in exactly 3 minutes.
I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.
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?
It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extra-ordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.
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?'
I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
There are many photos of Eisenstein. I think he was quite vain, and he liked photos of him. Being a virgin at 33 is strange now, but let's not be too high-minded about that.
There are, after all, approaches to be made other than the dependable routes that massage sentimental expectations and provide easy opportunities for emotional identification.
My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby - but just me. Nobody else.