Top 100 American Film Quotes
#1. For the most part, the American film market has become very corporatised, even independent film to a degree, and because of the corporate management mentality, they want to take the safe way.
Anthony LaPaglia
#2. When I'm making an American film, it's more safe because there are so many people on the set to watch me. Whatever I do, they say, 'What are you doing!? Tell me first!' There are so many restrictions.
Jackie Chan
#3. 'The Road' was my first American film, my first film in the snow. The first of everything. So, I was jumping into it, and that was pretty grueling.
Kodi Smit-McPhee
#4. 'Night Watch' itself is a very Russian movie. It's impossible to imagine this kind of movie somewhere else: a movie with a depressing ending, a lot of inexplicable storylines, strange characters. It's a Russian reflection of American film culture.
Timur Bekmambetov
#5. The greatest all-around American film actor is James Stewart.
David Denby
#6. That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.
Peter Greenaway
#7. I'm just interested in all of the different ways that a woman can be. We don't have enough, when it comes to American film, that shows all of the different complexities and ways that a woman is interesting and mysterious and dynamic and really complicated.
Brie Larson
#8. The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone.
Jack Valenti
#9. Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy.
Neil Jordan
#10. Most young people now are very vulnerable as to what the American film aficionados are going to say. They care too much about a system that has no room for them. It's really a serious issue for me, because to me it's, how do I survive beyond a film that was disgraced or praised?
Haile Gerima
#11. Every time I make an American film I just trust the American director and American writer. Myself, I would never make this kind of film. For me, those kinds of films are ridiculous. They don't make sense.
Jackie Chan
#12. Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, though it is not for the fainthearted.
David Denby
#13. The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business. It just doesn't work and you're going to hit a brick wall at some point.
Rupert Everett
#14. The future of American film lies on television.
David Hare
#15. I just think Australia tends to make very good movies, so if someone hands me an Australian or an American film script I would guess the Australian film would be more intriguing.
Barbara Hershey
#16. In the last ten years of watching films I have found that some of the foreign films I saw affected me most. One American film that stands out for me for its workmanship and artistry is 'Ratatouille.' It was an astonishing effort in filmmaking.
Irvin Kershner
#17. The dean of the American Film Institute has written that I'm one of the very few auteurs in America. I've had freedom for 40 years to create art that is totally personal and is what I believe in.
Lloyd Kaufman
#18. The business is so international now; you'll be working on an American film, and you'll start chatting to someone, and it's like: 'Oh, you're English, too.'
Imogen Poots
#19. I wrote and finished the script for 'Man in the Middle' two weeks after the September 11 bombing. It's a very American film about an ex-diplomat based in the Middle East, a leader in the U.S. administration who now sells used cars in the Middle East.
Ziad Doueiri
#20. I started watching so many different types of women, saw all the complexities of them, all the ways and the look and shapes they could be, and I felt it was missing for me in American film. I didn't see anybody I was watching in movies that felt like me. I felt rather tortured and lonely about it.
Brie Larson
#21. I wouldn't make an anti-American film. I'm one of the most pro-American foreigners I know. I love America and Americans.
Michael Caine
#22. Lucas George (Walton) (b.1944), American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He wrote and directed the science-fiction film Star Wars (1977),
Amazon Dictionary Account
#23. Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.
Jackie Chan
#25. When I say that I am going to do an American film, I didn't want to suddenly go off into a completely different world that which bears no relation to the style of filmmaking that I'm used to.
Park Chan-wook
#26. I wouldn't mind being in an American film for a laugh, but I certainly don't want to be in Thingy Blah Blah 3, if you know what I mean.
Audrey Tautou
#27. There aren't many American directors here trying to direct a Japanese yakuza film. When you combine that with the fact that I don't speak much Japanese and this was an independent film I was financing myself - people were curious about what I was doing.
John Foster
#28. Titanic I thought was the most dreadful piece of work I've ever seen in my entire life. Another film that I think is equally bad was American Beauty. So badly acted and directed. But people like that.
Robert Altman
#29. My view of myself doesn't change. I know who I am. I'm Cuban American; both my parents are Cuban - one was a little browner than the other one. That's who I am. I feel sorry that it's taken so long for the film industry to figure it out and to catch up.
Gina Torres
#30. I did not see myself as a leading lady. I thought I was really funny-looking and I would never be the lead, and I certainly would never do film or television. I wanted to do theater. I wanted to be the grand dame of the American stage.
Kathy Baker
#31. In the film industry, all the money is focused on television and the stupidity of American cinema.
Gerard Depardieu
#32. Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
David Mamet
#33. I first decided to become an actor at school. A teacher gave us a play to do and that had a major impact. At first, I wanted to work in the theatre, but there was something about the ambience of film, especially American films, that always attracted me.
Jean Reno
#34. I did not want 'Battleship' to be perceived as an American war film. I wanted to do everything I could to make the film accessible to a global audience. It felt like bringing an alien component to the film would help take the American jingoism out of it.
Peter Berg
#35. Well, I'm proud to say American Pie was the kind of crazy, gross-out film that guys thought was the greatest.
Jason Biggs
#36. Hollywood and Disneyland are the legacy of Europe's cultural imperialism. We gave them nursery rhymes and they gave back film. Televised riots are as American as Barbie/ Big Macs. Tomorrow the riots will be forgotten but Mickey mouse will still be there. Welcome to Disneyland.
Richey Edwards
#37. I'm also working on another independent film called Roxanne, Roxanne, about Roxanne Shante, who was one of the first African American battle rappers from Brooklyn. It is produced by Forest Whitaker and Pharrell [williams], so I'm really in great hands.
Nia Long
#38. I don't care where I work. Films are an international business - not an American institution.
Lee Van Cleef
#39. If you should attempt to maintain that film is an art in conversation with a cultured, intelligent American, he'll just plain stop talking to you.
Ilya Ilf
#40. I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern.
Francois Cluzet
#41. You never know what's coming for ya" from the 2008 American romantic fantasy drama film 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', directed by David Fincher.
Unknown
#42. Think about the number of people who do film music, make records and have a Native American heritage - and I may be the only one on the list.
Robbie Robertson
#43. American films are less American every day, because you have to please a world audience. There's less authenticity, so it's more accessible.
Ang Lee
#44. If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is.
Clint Eastwood
#45. In most of the European countries - France stands out in its resistance to this particular form of American cultural imperialism - the national film industries were forced onto the defensive after the war by such binding agreements.
Fredric Jameson
#46. I'm not saying that there weren't other inherent problems with the score that couldn't have been overcome with a bit of remixing, but why did they ask me to do it, and why did Griffin ask me to do it this way, for a film that had nothing to do with American vernacular?
Michael Nyman
#47. Blue jeans have gone around the world. But that's a product. We market blue jeans better, just as we market film better. But you can't tell me that if America didn't exist, the culture of movies wouldn't exist. It's not a distinctly American art form.
David Simon
#48. The American films just have so much more publicity and so much more money behind them that it's so hard to compete.
Georgina Haig
#49. Throughout the film the reporter kept up a ceaseless commentary in that eager, exalted tone that only American news reporters seem to achieve. It was as if he had - with enormous pleasure - just witnessed the end of the world.
Maj Sjowall
#50. I've just done a film in the United States. It's a thriller called 'A Crime', with Harvey Keitel, we play against each other, and it's so great to play in another language. But I'm definitely not American.
Emmanuelle Beart
#51. American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.
Sergei Eisenstein
#52. Nations need to constantly reaffirm their historical roots to maintain their political ideals. Motion pictures were one of the media used by nations to accommplish this task. The question one must ask is: Did the colonial films made faithfully represent the period in our nation's history?
John P. Harty Jr.
#53. In 2009, I went to Cannes with a short film in the Kodak emerging program at the American Pavilion.
Ryan Coogler
#54. My way of remaining French was the financing scheme I used for Quest for Fire, with Fox funds, since it started as a 100% American production. The film was not in French and yet was French in style, reflecting my personality.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
#55. I like a film such as 'American Beauty,' and I like 'Spider-Man.'
Ridley Scott
#56. I don't go home and pretend I'm August rather than just the actual lines I'm saying in the film. If you do it that way, it makes it more natural and second nature. After awhile you get used to it and there's so much, especially being in New York to film; you're always surrounded by American people.
Freddie Highmore
#57. If you make a film too American, it won't travel. It will have no life outside of its own country.
Baltasar Kormakur
#58. The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values.
Jeanine Basinger
#59. I made 'Siam Sunset.' In Australia, it was pretty much universally hated, but I did notice that almost any American who saw it loved that film, so in 2001 I made a film in America called 'Swimfan,' and they released like a big studio movie, and it made money.
John Polson
#60. I would like to be able to be both a film actor and a stage actor - to be an American actor in the style of a lot the English actors who do films. They are these wonderful actors who can do everything.
John Glover
#61. 'American Sniper' is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an underexplained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war.
Henry Giroux
#62. My relationship with American audiences is the exact same as it always has been. They never came to see my films, and they don't come now.
Woody Allen
#63. I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.
Paul Haggis
#64. When I make an American movie it's going to come out all over the world-it doesn't happen the same way for an Italian film or a French film.
Monica Bellucci
#65. We didn't create the culture of film. We certainly market it better than anyone in the world, but film could have happened anywhere. It's not distinctly American, as witnessed by the fact that there are film communities throughout the world that tell stories to their own cultural liking.
David Simon
#66. 'American Graffiti' stayed in my mind, but I don't think to this day I've done a film that captured that same level of melancholy. It was so well done. Talking about it has given me the idea I might try harder to make that melancholy film!
Jean Reno
#67. I'm American and I wanted my friend and people to see ' Red Army' . I didn't want it to be a film for Russia, although I did show it there and they absolutely loved it.
Gabe Polsky
#68. I was a young film student around the time of the new wave in film in the 1970s; old Hollywood was naff and over. For me, as a film student, I was going to see French and Italian cinema; American cinema was 'Easy Rider' and 'Taxi Driver.' Everything was gritty.
Gillian Armstrong
#69. I love films from all these different points of views that used the idea of the school as a way to talk about the American experience. It took me a while to figure how to write a movie like that, because that's not something you learn at film school
Justin Simien
#70. I wanted to do a political film that is as nonpartisan as can be, because I wanted to do a story that was American. I wanted to tell an American tragedy.
Paul Haggis
#71. I didn't grow up watching film but as a Ukrainian-American, music and stories and dance are crucial.
Vera Farmiga
#72. I really woke up one morning and said, you know, 'I haven't seen a good film about the American Revolution. And all the ones I have seen haven't been successful, but I'm going to make a successful one.' Well, I wasn't able to do that.
Irwin Winkler
#73. When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival.
Rory Kennedy
#74. I would love to get a role that changes the landscape of being an African American woman in television and film.
Candice Patton
#75. So that's Godzilla, he's ultimately going to get you regardless of what you do. Maybe the people who made the American Godzilla film were scared of that. They didn't want him to represent that, to represent something we couldn't deal with because, "We're American's, we can deal with anything".
Brad Warner
#76. I'm a big fan of American vaudeville and Hollywood silent film-era slapstick and the music halls full of ridiculous, eccentric characters.
Lenny Abrahamson
#77. I think one of the most important American films is 'Jackie Brown,' which is such a humble depiction of humble characters but so powerful. The film was pure depiction of the American poverty of the '90s.
Arnaud Desplechin
#78. There's something about an American soldier you can't explain. They're so grateful for anything, even a film actress coming to see them.
Marlene Dietrich
#79. The Western is as American as a film can get - there's the discovery of a frontier, the element of a showdown, revenge, and determining the best gunman. There's a certain masculinity to the Western that really appealed to me, and I've always wanted to do a Western in Hollywood.
Kim Jee-woon
#80. In film, I was surprised when I first saw the movie 'Drive.' I said, 'Oh, God. It sounds great - I love it. Wow, this could be the soundtrack from 'American Gigolo' or 'Cat People.' But I'm surprised that the director would agree with a composer to write that kind of sound.
Giorgio Moroder
#81. I really wanted to work in the American industry because it's the leading industry. It's where film and television started.
Jason Gann
#82. I really thought Reagan was going to push the button and blow us all up. It was scary. So when they did the 1998 American Godzilla film, Hollywood didn't understand what Godzilla was.
Brad Warner
#83. MAN: Do you have black and white film posters?
BOOKSELLER: Yes, we do. They're over here.
MAN: Do you have any posters of Adolf Hitler?
BOOKSELLER: Pardon?
MAN: Adolf Hitler.
BOOKSELLER: Well, he wasn't a film star, was he.
MAN: Yes, he was. He was American. Jewish, I think ...
Jen Campbell
#85. I have done film, television and theatre - all at a pretty substantial level - I don't think it's possible for American actors to do that.
Helen Mirren
#86. So I am getting a little bored with defining one type of film as American and the other European or from somewhere else because the division is no longer true.
Wim Wenders
#87. 'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?
Alex Gibney
#88. When American producers see my film, they think that I had a big budget to do it, like 23 million. But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget. I did 'Mars et Avril' for only 2.3 million.
Martin Villeneuve
#89. The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.
Jean Cocteau
#90. A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.
Kevin Spacey
#91. I was a banker in Morocco when I first saw 'American Graffiti.' It was before I was an actor, a melancholy time in my life, and this mood was reflected in the film.
Jean Reno
#92. Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That's why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society.
Jean-Luc Godard
#93. When the American documentary filmmaker Donn Alan Pennebaker wanted to do a film on Dylan, Dylan asked him what he'd already done, and Pennebaker answered, Nothing except shots in the street. Dylan asked to see them, and he agreed to let him do the film.
Raymond Depardon
#94. American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really.
Richard Ayoade
#95. Eventually, in '84, we made a film for a little over a million dollars - with American actors that was shot in English - that was shown in Finland A little action film called Born American.
Renny Harlin
#96. Unlike the book, with a documentary, you get a chance to show much more texture and color. Film gives you get a chance to focus on much more individuals who are pivotal in changing the landscape of American culture.
Steve Stoute
#97. The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.
Katharine Hepburn
#98. With a film, you try to keep your vision in it. I think with 'The American' and 'Control' I managed to do that.
Anton Corbijn
#99. Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.
Martin Scorsese
#100. I've often gone to start a film only to find the producers surprised to discover that I'm American.
Alessandro Nivola
