British Film Quotes

#1. I have always thought we should think less about the British film industry as an entity, and more about getting British talent working.

Eric Fellner

#2. For British cinema to survive, you really need a British film culture, and it's got to start down there, with young kids watching films in the cinema - so they can be transported to a different world.

Gurinder Chadha

#3. I'm somebody who is very, very proud to have been a part of the British film industry all my life and to have kind of been involved with a very important piece of British film history.

Daniel Radcliffe

#4. I like the constant rise and fall of the British film industry. But above all, I like the workhorses who kept going no matter what.

Peter Capaldi

#5. It's weathered many a storm, but the British film industry is, thankfully, still afloat.

Peter Capaldi

#6. As a black actress, all I was offered in British film was the best friend role, whereas in TV I was offered a whole spectrum of parts.

Sophie Okonedo

#7. If my British film career was a girl, then I'd been hanging around outside her apartment a little bit too long.

Rufus Sewell

#8. One of the best things about the award season is that when a British film succeeds at the Oscars and BAFTAs, such as 'Slumdog Millionaire' in 2009 and 'The King's Speech' this year, the British public get right behind it with an immense sense of national pride.

Gurinder Chadha

#9. My first British film was Gurinder Chadha's 'Bend It Like Beckham,' which was a huge international success.

Anupam Kher

#10. The thing that runs through the British film industry even today is a lot of unsung movies are financially the bigger ones. Even though they weren't always the greatest of movies, something in them was very potent which people loved.

Peter Capaldi

#11. I think the British industry is set up to support British film, if we make films that enable them to support it. If you don't make a commercial film, distributors can't get behind it. If they don't get behind it, the film doesn't do well.

Noel Clarke

#12. Film-makers should remain true to their principles and never compromise, there is a real revival in the British film industry but there is a danger that we will become colonial servants of Hollywood. We need to maintain our own integrity.

Mike Leigh

#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. I was offered Fagin-type roles, but I wanted to do new things. I could have worked in America, but there was a recession in the British film industry, and I wanted to work in England. I've no regrets.

Ron Moody

#15. 'Viceroy' is the first British film about the Raj and the transfer of power from Britain to India made by a British Indian director. It is a British film made from an Indian perspective.

Gurinder Chadha

#16. The Hollywood image of the movie business is all about ambition and high achievers like James Cameron. But the British film industry is much more about men who wear cravats and work with model trains and hope another series of 'Thomas the Tank Engine' will be commissioned.

Peter Capaldi

#17. If there's a British film in the marketplace that is successful on a worldwide basis - whether it's 'A Room with a View,' 'Four Weddings' or 'The Full Monty' - money follows, and everyone tries to emulate that success.

Eric Fellner

#18. A lot of the reasons that I'm resistant to making films in the U.S. have nothing to do with not doing a film in Hollywood, but rather to do with what I'm committed to working on in the U.K. I feel very committed to the British film industry and infrastructure.

Mike Leigh

#19. When I became the chair of the British Film Institute, I didn't understand how much of my time would be taken up with trying to make a case for the British Film Institute: what it's for, why it exists, why it needs its money.

Anthony Minghella

#20. I think it's important that we have a new batch of British film-makers that aren't doing the same old stuff. And that includes me.

Noel Clarke

#21. The British film industry has always tried to sell itself as something rather sophisticated. It's almost as if it thinks it is by royal command. It has always tried to claim the high ground, not only over Hollywood but over the whole of humanity!

Peter Capaldi

#22. The problem with the British film industry is the nervousness and insecurity about - and genuflection toward - Los Angeles.

Mike Leigh

#23. I'd love to work in the States; I'd love to work anywhere where you get a good script and a good part to play. But I do love British film as well.

Laura Carmichael

#24. My father in the film - which we probably haven't seen in previous movies, and in British Asian movies you could probably count on one hand - he says exactly why, actually why he's frightened for his daughter. He came to this country, England, and had a bit of a crappy time.

Parminder Nagra

#25. But we had a fantastic coach, Simon Clifford, who runs a British football youth game which teaches Brazilian techniques - which is what we wanted to incorporate into the film. And some of those things we eventually got in.

Parminder Nagra

#26. I loved working on 'Happy Gilmore' because I love to travel to new places and we got to go to British Columbia. Any Adam Sandler film is fun to work on because it is a reunion of the boys club of guys that have worked together in the past.

Kevin Nealon

#27. After college, I funded my short films with acting roles in film and TV. I learned my craft through the great opportunities British television gave me as a director.

Justin Chadwick

#28. 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' is a British comedy-drama directed by John Madden. The film is based on the 2004 novel, 'These Foolish Things', by Deborah Moggach.

Tena Desae

#29. There is a whole bunch of great British actors of my age who aren't film stars or theatre actors; they're very much both.

Harry Lloyd

#30. 'Up the Junction' went on to inform my love of British social realism. It was the first film I saw of this ilk, a very stark, visceral reflection of England, an England I didn't necessarily feel a part of but that I knew was out there. You could almost smell the bread and butter and cabbage.

Gurinder Chadha

#31. 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

#32. I had been in a film, playing a young British aristocrat. My wife told me that she was invited to a dinner and she invited me to dinner and the hostess had seen me and said, 'You cannot bring him.' but I think that I've done enough to shatter the image.

Michael York

#33. I want to be able to follow the example of those extraordinary British actresses who move effortlessly from film to TV to theatre roles.

Cate Blanchett

#34. 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.

Gurinder Chadha

#35. I'd like to film a British commercial; they're better than American ones.

James Earl Jones

#36. British people might wonder 'What the hell is Kenneth Branagh doing directing 'Thor?' but the person asking that the most was Kenneth Branagh. I think he was more surprised than anyone else to find himself doing this kind of film.

Tadanobu Asano

#37. British diplomats who worked in Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis are deeply upset by Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning film 'Argo,' which suggests they refused shelter to the group who managed to get out of the U.S. embassy.

Simon Hoggart

#38. I'd like to talk in my own accent, but then there's that thing about getting typecast as, 'The British guy.' The role that makes you, that's normally what you're cast as forever more. Like, if I did a huge film with my British accent, that would be that.

Ryan Cartwright

#39. Theatre is relatively easy if you're British - you're living in the theatre capital of the world, London - there are so many places you can work, still. If I had begun to think of myself as a film actor, I think I would have got distracted.

Ian McKellen

#40. Morris Weissman [on the phone, discussing casting for his movie]: What about Claudette Colbert? She's British, isn't she? She sounds British. Is she, like, affected or is she British?

Julian Fellowes

#41. Astonishing times. Who would have imagined that the Crazy Gang would yield a Hollywood film star (Vinny Jones), a British television ever-present (John Fashanu) and now a televised African dance champion?

Giles Smith

#42. My first job was a film called 'Storm Damage' for the BBC. I was 16 and working with really respected British actors. I didn't have an agent at the time, and it kind of threw me into real acting.

Ashley Madekwe

#43. In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

Ridley Scott

#44. It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.

William Monahan

#45. I worked with Michelle Yeoh on my last film, 'Far North,' and her partner is Jean Todt; at the time, he ran Ferrari. So I went as a VIP to the British grand prix.

Asif Kapadia

#46. To her British lover about to climb in bed with 80-something Mae: She said that she hoped soon to be able to say what Paul Revere said - 'The British are coming'. This was the last one-liner Mae ever uttered on film.

Mae West

#47. Racing cars which have been converted for road use never really work. It's like making a hard core adult film, and then editing it so that it can be shown in British hotels. You'd just end up with a sort of half hour close up of some bloke's sweaty face.

Jeremy Clarkson