Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have respect for anyone who's going to go out and make a movie for a small budget and turn it into a phenomenon. God bless you. Please keep making movies. That's great. But it's not what entertains me.
History is for all of us to discuss. All history is our common heritage to discuss and analyze. The founding of the state of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing is there for us all to discuss.
If you're in Hollywood, with no track record, it's pretty odds-on that you can get swamped and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all; particularly with the intense commercial push that you feel there.
On various shows, I've been the producing-director, the executive producer-director; and if you were working with the material you love with the right group of people, it's an incredible job to be doing.
If you look at the least effective of the 'Twilight' movies, it was when they brought in an action-movie director instead of a director who was really a good storyteller. And you can tell the difference.
Today we no longer know what to call art, what its function is and even less what function it will have in the future. We know only that it is something dynamic - unlike many ideas that have governed us.
Definitely it would be foolish to try and make my Czech films here in America, as foolish as it is when some Czech filmmakers try to make movies of America in Czechoslovakia. It was always abysmal stuff.
To the leaders of the cinema still to come, I can offer only a few words drawn from my modest experience. You must ceaselessly formulate and sharpen your critical views, both of others and of yourselves.
We really throw ourselves into our work and the details from your life show up from time to time in the finished film. Our personal experiences really help to bring shape to the movies we make at Disney.
If you're brought up Catholic, you're convinced of magic at a very early age. You're convinced the world isn't entirely real, which is a kind of conviction that never leaves you, for some strange reason.
I like where we're going with technology and global integration, but the fact that corporations and dollars rule everything in our lives, I don't like it. This isn't the Hollywood I wanted to be part of.
When I started working as a writer-director, that's when he became Paul Thomas Anderson and I became Paul W.S. Anderson. Neither of us can write and direct an American movie under the name Paul Anderson.
When you watch movies in Britain, the reaction when people hate a movie is... they just politely get up and leave at the end. And when they love a movie... they just politely get up and leave at the end.
The power of consumer goods . . . has been engendered by the so-called liberal and progressive demands of freedom, and, by appropriating them, has emptied them of their meaning, and changed their nature.
I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It's all language, it's all communication.
I was trained to look at colour, edges, to see negative space. I honestly think my greatest influence as a writer is from Cubism - the idea of a multi-faceted, multi-perspective way of looking at things.
I do think it is a kind of illness in the sense that it sets you apart, it injects you with an endless, unslakable thirst to keep making the thing. The artist has to voluntarily use themselves endlessly.
If we had written Tristan in the true vernacular the audience would have been very small. It wouldn't have even been Shakespearean. It would have been so Celtic you wouldn't understand what was going on.
For the young generation, when they see that there is a film director from Cambodia to go on to be nominated, for them, a lot can change. I don't know another way to restore our identity if it's not art.
Hollywood wants to own everything. I don't want to own anything. I don't want people just to make content, I want to empower and teach them to create content they own that they can exploit in any medium.
I think that will be a lot of fun for audiences to get the same stream of consciousness that was going through my head at the time. It was very exciting to suddenly recall what I was feeling at the time.
The director's job is to know what emotional statement he wants a character to convey in his scene or his line, and to exercise taste and judgment in helping the actor give his best possible performance.
Hollywood was set up by a bunch of businessmen. They do not see their job as being philanthropists. I don't think it's a contradiction in terms to attempt to be a good businessman and to also be liberal.
There are always things I have to remove. I might look at a shot for five months, when somebody new to the screening room will say, 'hey, there's a modern air conditioner in that window.' It's a process.
All producers encourage you, whatever it is, to make it more-so. If you've got a joke, can it be funnier? If you've got an action sequence, can it be more exciting? That's the nature of being a producer.
There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
I'm delighted that 'The Sound of Music' is doing so well. Of course, it's an infallible piece of material. Even when second- and third-rate road companies were doing the play, they did enormous business.
I always look for nature or natural lighting within buildings and within rooms that has been done by somebody else to suit their needs. I look at it very closely as a photographic thing, then enhance it.
There is another movie I love that always sticks with me and influenced me called "Frankie" starring Diane Kruger as a model past her prime trying to make it work and going crazy from how she is treated.
Maybe more than a teller, I am a story listener. I really enjoy listening to stories. I remember them and keep them in my mind. All of my films are a collection of small stories that have been told to me.
I am not a special person, I am not especially strong; I am not especially gifted. I simply do not like to show my weakness, and I hate to lose, so I am a person who tries hard. That's all there is to me.
To get discounts on some drugs, private insurers are willing to pay top prices for blockbuster pharmaceuticals like Vioxx, despite the fact that Vioxx was rumored to cause fatal strokes and heart attacks.
We're all going to keep telling love stories, we're all going to tell hero stories. It's all a question of what your own thumbprint, your own DNA, is, and what it brings to the table that makes it unique.
It was actually Peter's idea that I should make the film. He called me in the very beginning, and I hadn't even read the book. So I read it and I liked it very much and I knew I'd certainly like to do it.
The authenticity aspect is pretty important to me. When we have to compromise and do something that's not authentic, it really rubs me, every time I have to see it in the edit, which is millions of times.
When I was 20, I was living in the Alps, snowboarding and studying political science. I blew out my knee, and I began to realize my days in the sport were numbered; the reality was I would never be a pro.
Obviously, 'Twilight' had its own alchemy that was amazing, just phenomenal. Nobody thought it was going to make any money. Paramount wouldn't make the movie. Fox wouldn't make it. Nobody wanted to do it.
Actors want to act. I think a lot of times what happens is that they're expected to bring it all. Probably because I'm a writer, I'm not telling them what to do. I just provide them with as much as I can.
I shot 'Blue Valentine' on 16mm for the past, and for the present on the Red Camera. I feel that both formats are valid. The stories should dictate the format we shoot on. Filmmakers should have a choice.
You don't see a wonderful shot in a comedy. Why? Because they don't want to distract you from what matters, which is the joke. It has to be funny, so usually all the things in the background don't matter.
The secret is not to give up hope. It's very hard not to because if you're really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.
Suddenly everything came together in one place. All my likes, everything I actually seemed to have talent for was right there. I said, "Hey, this is it. I can do this really well. I really love to do it."
I thought it [Star Wars] was too wacky for the general public. Right or wrong this is my movie, this is my decision, and this is my creative vision, and if people don't like it, they don't have to see it.
I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in.
I just remember that pivotal moment when you're a young adult, and you realize that these authority figures are human beings, too, and they're figuring out their lives just as you are, and they're flawed.
I love 'I'm British But...' It's such a sweet, innocent, open-hearted film, and it has the sort of openness that I still aspire to with everything I do. It wears its heart, head, everything on its sleeve.
I lived in a small town. It was 2,000 people in Canada. A little river that went through it and we swam in the - you know, there was a lot of water around. Niagara Falls was about four or five miles away.
The sad truth for American actors is that they really have no control whatsoever over the material that they get, or can do, particularly actresses. And if you're over 40 and you're an actress, forget it.
Trust yourself so that the mistakes you make are the ones you've made and not something you've made because you were afraid to do what you wanted to do. Own your mistakes, then you can own your successes.
What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.