About Cinema Quotes

#1. I'm not educated about cinema or genres.

Imtiaz Ali

#2. All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That's what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.

Ira Sachs

#3. Mr. Hitchcock taught me everything about cinema. It was thanks to him that I understood that murder scenes should be shot like love scenes and love scenes like murder scenes.

Grace Kelly

#4. That's the funny thing about cinema, it is an intellectual medium, but it's also sort of anti-intellectual.

Brit Marling

#5. You become a film critic because you're interested in film. I don't know whether knowing so much about cinema leads you to make better films, but it certainly can't hurt.

Michael Haneke

#6. I don't know anything about life, but everything about cinema.

Romy Schneider

#7. I can't help moving my face - reacting - when I watch a movie, because I'm really inhabiting a character. I know this is weird, but it demonstrates what I love about cinema: it allows you to live a different life, to have a different experience, to disappear for two hours. I think it's wonderful.

Emma Stone

#8. There is no border. I'm branding my films as Malay cinema, but it's just about cinema. Everything that I make is about humanity's struggle, so there is no border, really.

Lav Diaz

#9. I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person.

Claire Denis

#10. I care about cinema even though I haven't made many films.

Leos Carax

#11. I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

#12. When you're so passionate about cinema, the idea to direct your own film is really appealing.

Gaspard Ulliel

#13. One of the things I love about cinema is the range.

Mike Figgis

#14. I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#15. When you make a film it is like asking yourself a question. When it is finished, you know the answer. Ultimately with all of cinema, we are just trying to learn about ourselves. I have always used the opportunity to make a film to learn more about myself, which I am still doing.

Francis Ford Coppola

#16. Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.

Michael Caine

#17. Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite.

A.O. Scott

#18. Doing cinema is not about watching yourself.

Charlotte Rampling

#19. My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.

Bruno Dumont

#20. Cinema has only been around for about 100 years. Has all of the world's violence towards women taken place only within the past 100 years?

Richard King

#21. What I am really curious about is the visuals of cinema ... the form.

Valeria Golino

#22. Being a musician, people ask you a lot about what musicians inspire you, and there's plenty of musicians that I love and respect, but I think that I'm the most inspired by cinema.

Halsey

#23. I remember queuing around the block in Sheffield when I was growing up. At that time, going to the cinema was really something special - there was something about the style of the real thing that is immeasurable nicer than multiplexes.

Michael Palin

#24. 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?

Peter Greenaway

#25. China's cinema has been rising for some time; it has more exposure, so my chances of becoming internationally known are better. But the first thing I have to do is learn English. If I can grasp the language, then perhaps I can think about the U.S.

Ziyi Zhang

#26. One of the nicest things I ever read about our show was that a critic felt 'Boardwalk Empire' could be the beginning of the blur between television and cinema, because the production values are so high and the storytelling is so compelling.

Terence Winter

#27. The most delightful aspect about the language of cinema is that it speaks to each of us in different ways - it is a purely subjective experience.

Tina Ambani

#28. Of course it's true: the public want to see young people - young people are the people who go to the cinema. It's a sad fact of life, but you've got to accept it and not whine about it.

Joan Collins

#29. I was raised in a family where cinema was a way of life. It was not only about making films, it was relationship, passion, love, everything at the same time.

Thomas Langmann

#30. I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, I learned so much today, that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It's only 100 years old.

Francis Ford Coppola

#31. I know my audience, and they, in turn, know my cinema. When I pick a subject, it's for a family audience. I shoot and edit my films keeping them in mind. I'm dead sure about the product that bears my name.

Rohit Shetty

#32. My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.

Sergio Leone

#33. I kind of worry about that a little bit - we lost our film culture for 30 years because the Americans came in and bought up all the cinema chains and wouldn't show any Australian films.

Yahoo Serious

#34. Cinema is entertainment, and people go to the movies because they want to feel good and forget about everything.

Vincent Cassel

#35. The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#36. There is no border in my films. You can see yourself in these stories. This is the greatest thing about the power of cinema. It's very present. It's all there. You can't escape it.

Lav Diaz

#37. I got exposed to art-house cinema and foreign films. I was from L.A., so it was a film culture that I didn't know about.

Lisa Cholodenko

#38. 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?

Martin Scorsese

#39. I wanted to make a film about my dad, a sort of love letter, and explain what I understood of his cinema, which was so utopian. I also wanted to give the sense of his cinema, because they have never been very big box-office, but they were very influential.

Isabella Rossellini

#40. I think cinema should provoke thoughts, sure, but using it as I soapbox I think is the wrong place. I never want to be part of something like that, where there's an agenda there that's not about telling a story, where its someone getting on a soapbox and preaching their own beliefs onto somebody.

Jeremy Renner

#41. After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.

Harmony Korine

#42. When I went to the cinema as a boy, when I saw a war film, I thought the general was the star, and that Cary Grant was an extra. I had no idea about the structure of film, but I loved going to the cinema.

Nicolas Roeg

#43. Well the least favourite question is the one that one's asked particularly about in Japan is what's the difference between theatre and cinema and I think, well, that's about eighty bucks.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

#44. Cinema is about people, and we are a very emotional people. That is why you see those ups and those downs and those colours. That is what Indian cinema is about.

Vidya Balan

#45. 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.

Bruno Dumont

#46. This is one of the things I don't like so much about French cinema - we have tendency to concentrate on actors and dialogue and we don't care so much about the visual aspect. I love when you use all the elements at your disposal.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

#47. Romance: That's one of the things that makes Spider-Man really unique, in terms of the comic books. There is a tender, romantic quality to it. And certainly, that's something that's always fascinated me about the cinema: good romance.

Marc Webb

#48. There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film
certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.

Peter Greenaway

#49. When I go to a film, you're taking it easy and you let things wash over you. That's what cinema's all about. You get involved in a world that's being created in front of you.

Mary Hansen

#50. Look, I wasn't saying the Beatles are better than God or Jesus. I said 'Beatles' because it's easy for me to talk about Beatles. I could have said TV or the cinema, motor cars or anything popular and I would have gotten away with it.

John Lennon

#51. Previously the same Polish audiences would have been pressured into seeing cinema made for adults, films made by us about those spheres of life that were significant for us and which should be significant for our society.

Andrzej Wajda

#52. I suppose I am gently cynical about notions of who we think we are, but I certainly don't hate my fellow man. I think my cinema, although it might often deal with death and decay, is highly celebratory.

Peter Greenaway

#53. I don't know about the whole song-and-dance thing. But if India will have me, the independent cinema scene there is something I'm really interested in.

Manish Dayal

#54. When I started my goal was to make a successful underground movie. I started making movies in the mid-60s. Underground cinema then only lasted about two or three years.

John Waters

#55. Action roles - or any role - should go to the best guy for the job. People obsess about nationality. Hollywood and America might be the hub for pop culture and cinema for the Western world, but that shouldn't suggest that all the roles should go to young American men.

Jai Courtney

#56. I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

Ralph Fiennes

#57. Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world.

Stellan Skarsgard

#58. Cinema is a wonderful art form for talking about loneliness. We can experience films together with other people. It can be a collective experience of loneliness. We're alone in the dark of the theater, but with other people.

Joachim Trier

#59. In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe, they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!

Jonas Mekas

#60. I think that nudity is beautiful. Sometimes it can be awful, but when it's beautiful? Cinema is the art about reality; it's art from reality. In French we say l'art de la realite. You show reality, so you have to show bodies.

Lea Seydoux

#61. People all over the world feed upon U.S. cinema and don't know about their own.

Michel Ocelot

#62. For me, it is very important to believe in the kind of movies I do. 'Rang De Basanti' made me feel good about Indian cinema. The movie instilled in me a confidence so strong, that I wanted to be a part of the revolution in Bollywood.

Vir Das

#63. 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'.

Samantha Morton

#64. Manmohan Desai's cinema wasn't about logic. It was about exuberance, vitality and above all, entertainment.

Anupama Chopra

#65. I think that distributors and marketing companies realise that there are a huge number of women over 40 who want to go the cinema and see films about themselves. Women of my age don't want to be force-fed with stuff about 25-year-olds.

Lesley Manville

#66. But Hollywood cinema remains profoundly conservative, profoundly stupid, and often painful. About one out of every ten films is okay, meaning a little bit better than the average.

T. Jefferson Kline

#67. You know what's it's changed is my appreciate for the art form of making cinema. I don't want to act as much as I want to tell stories. I want to be a part of the whole collective and pull all of the pieces together. That's what I love about directing.

Jason Momoa

#68. I love acting. I've been doing it since I was 16, and it's in my nature. It's the thing I do best. But as much as I love acting, I love cinema more. I always had a thing about creating images.

Valeria Golino

#69. When I say that it's taken us [with Luca Guadagnino ] 11 years to make this film, what I mean is that it was 11 years ago that we started to talk about a kind of cinema that we wanted to make together.

Tilda Swinton

#70. I think people need to understand that with plays and with cinema, when you hear about it, call and get a ticket then or go and see it then. It's especially with the play, which I can do because it's a limited run.

Alfre Woodard

#71. The difference that a drama group or a cinema club can make to a small village or a town. It opens people up to ideas, potential about themselves that really, in a way, education often fails to. It's a way of drawing a community together.

Gabriel Byrne

#72. Film is something that reaches so many people. How many people are going to go into a gallery? And understand what they're seeing? I think about the guy walking down the street, the guy who drove me here - this guy has the opportunity to go the cinema.

Henry Hopper

#73. Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about ... whatever. Now we're walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk had a fight with a robot.

Simon Pegg

#74. I tend to play characters that I can infuse with certain kinds of humour. Even the baddest guy can be funny in his own particular way. I want the audience to engage with the character on some deeper level so that they leave the cinema still thinking about him.

Samuel L. Jackson

#75. Americans think cinema is about storytelling; I don't believe that. I think it's a language and everyone has to find their own way of speaking. It's not so much what you say as the way you say it.

Marjane Satrapi

#76. When I was on The View, Barbara Walters was asking me about the blood and stuff, and I said, 'Well, you know, that's a staple of Japanese cinema.' And then she came back, 'But this is America.' And I go, 'I don't make movies for America. I make movies for planet Earth.'

Quentin Tarantino

#77. The best cinema is about ethics.

Alexander Payne

#78. The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.

Michael Caine

#79. For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.

Jacques Audiard

#80. Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.

Federico Fellini

#81. Being the director is really something. It's a statement of something and you have to stand up for that. Okay, this is what I see. This is how I see the world. This is how I see cinema. And you have to be able to talk about that and explain it and be responsible.

Mathieu Demy

#82. There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.

Toby Jones

#83. I'll definitely say that, before film school, I didn't have much of a film-history background. I didn't know much about classic cinema.

Cary Fukunaga

#84. The future of cinema and communications is all about collaboration and the decentralized control of storytelling. We're all part of the story; we can all contribute and participate.

Adrian Grenier

#85. It wasn't about who had dibs now or who was sitting next to whom in the cinema. The game had changed; or rather, it wasn't a game at all anymore. It was a matter of making it through the night, which is often harder than it sounds, and always a very individual business.

Amor Towles

#86. If you really spend time with movies, it's three years of your life from beginning to end. I started out planting the seed with 'Monster's Ball' about independent cinema and raising money and that whole thing as a producer, and then it becomes easier for me.

Lee Daniels

#87. I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.

Lars Von Trier

#88. Indian cinema is entertaining, and what I love most about it is the songs and dances in the films.

Pierce Brosnan

#89. This film business, perhaps more so in America than in Europe, has always been about young sexuality. It's not true of theatre, but in America, film audiences are young. It's not an intellectual cinema in America.

Jacqueline Bisset

#90. You realize true magic of cinema when you put the right people together, at the right time, with the right kind of project, where they're not worried about their salary, they're not worried about their caravan.

Jean-Marc Barr

#91. 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.

Jonas Mekas

#92. I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something's been confirmed for them about life.

Danny Boyle

#93. The cinema that I make is a cinema about people, emotion, humanity and passion. It's not just about what they struggle through, but what they live for. That's what I love. The music they love, the people they love, the clothing, the hair and the life that they love

David O. Russell

#94. In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.

William Monahan

#95. Elaine and I got married in summer 1979, we went on our honeymoon and came back for the premiere of 'Scum.' All of sudden my face was on billboards in Leicester Square and people were crowding outside the cinema, going mad about the film. It was a complete shock.

Ray Winstone

#96. My work is better, maybe all filmmakers are better, for Polanski's imprint on cinema. He created language for all of us to use, there is no question about that.

Allison Anders

#97. That's what I like about film-it can be bizarre, classic, normal, romantic. Cinema is to me the most versatile thing.

Catherine Deneuve

#98. When making a film, I'm never concerned about whether the theme is new or whether it's been done before in cinema or not. I'm led to make films if there's a theme that interests me or I experience something in my own life that confronts me with something that I want to deal with.

Michael Haneke

#99. When I go to the cinema, I'm often frustrated because I can guess exactly what is going to happen about ten minutes into the screening. So, when I'm working on a subject, I'm always looking for the element of surprise.

Sergio Leone

#100. I would always slip away to the cinema. I always found something absolutely extraordinary about the fact that these actors were always kind of kicking hard at some new dimension they were doing on film.

Geoffrey Rush