Top 100 Cinema Is Quotes
#1. The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.
Michel Hazanavicius
#2. 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
#3. Most, especially the young filmmakers, do not see strength in communal or collective existence. They just think they're going to conquer the world as individuals. There is no world like that. In cinema it's always, even in Hollywood, a collective surge.
Haile Gerima
#4. Comics are just another medium to express yourself. It's not cinema; it's not literature; it's just something else. It has a specific requirement, which is that images are used to tell the story. There are lots of crappy movies, with guns and action and Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever.
Marjane Satrapi
#5. 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
#6. In Majorca, I can be myself. I go to the supermarket and the cinema, and I am just Rafa. Everyone knows me, and it is no big deal. I can go all day - no photographs.
Rafael Nadal
#7. Sex appeal is a good thing for commercial cinema. Though I can't sit at home and consider myself a sex symbol, it is for people to do so. I want to be known as an interesting actor.
Randeep Hooda
#8. What I am really curious about is the visuals of cinema ... the form.
Valeria Golino
#9. Cinema is mass media, it is both overtly gross and exciting. It is our great mirror of society.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#10. If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
Susan Sontag
#11. My life is existing. Cinema is certainly not my life
Bruno Dumont
#12. When you're a writer, you pull your life into your work. My first love is cinema. That's where I want to be judged.
Roger Avary
#13. Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
Werner Herzog
#14. I hate that people think going to the theatre is a special occasion. I wish people would treat it as normally as going to the cinema.
Brenda Blethyn
#15. Cinema is dominated by stars you like from the get go.
Claude Lelouch
#16. My theory is, I don't know how long it's going to be, five or ten years, there will be only two ways to see a movie, and that will either be on your computer through your TV screen or in the cinema, end of story. There will be no DVD; that's it - simple.
Eric Fellner
#17. At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#18. I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.
Kim Ki-duk
#19. On Being John Malkovich and the cinema of the absurd, I do enjoy it. I wish there were more like it. The very fact that there can't be more like it is one of the reasons it's admirable.
Carter Burwell
#20. The most important question in American cinema, I've learned, is 'When is lunch?'
Tommy Lee Jones
#21. Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.
Andrzej Wajda
#22. I love escaping into film, because everyday life I find quite troublesome. So any excuse to go into a cinema and say goodbye to the world for a couple of hours, or in a book or whatever, is great.
Alison Goldfrapp
#23. I am grateful to theatre for making me what I am today. But it's not like theatre is my first love. I am equally attached to cinema, which is, actually, a child of theatre, since it borrows heavily from it.
Om Puri
#24. Every year there's a jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Getting on the jury is very competitive in France. Not because the French love cinema, but because they love to judge.
Craig Ferguson
#25. For me cinema is image, sound, and the faces and bodies and, yes, voices, of my actors, and sometimes the words that they are saying, but not only the words.
Julia Loktev
#26. There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.
Peter Greenaway
#27. Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.
David Cronenberg
#28. My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.
Sergio Leone
#29. As for radio and movies, I like the movies better, although the work is much harder. The cinema has microphone technique, staging, and glamour all wrapped up into one.
Rudy Vallee
#30. I have an appreciation for what some people would call "bad acting," but which I think can be much more real than the overly emotive, technical and supposedly "realistic" acting that is so prevalent in mainstream cinema.
Bruce LaBruce
#31. I am an animator. I feel like I'm the manager of a animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. I'm rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work.
Hayao Miyazaki
#32. When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
Michael Haneke
#33. That's the funny thing about cinema, it is an intellectual medium, but it's also sort of anti-intellectual.
Brit Marling
#34. As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.
Orson Welles
#35. 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
#36. The landscape of cinema is not original. Not to say there aren't great movies being made, but it's much easier for studios to make movies that have built-in audiences. So it's all remakes, adaptations, a lot of remakes of adaptations.
Charlie Hunnam
#37. I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
Salman Rushdie
#38. Today's cinema is a global art form, it is impossible to make movies for a market the size of France, representing no more than 4% of the world's total.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
#39. Cinema is a territory. It exists outside of movies. It's a place I live in. It's a way of seeing things, of experiencing life. But making films, that's supposed to be a profession.
Leos Carax
#40. I still don't feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic language. You can't separate one from the other.
Toby Jones
#41. 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
#43. I was lucky to start working when German cinema was having an interesting moment. Now the quality is going downhill again because they're insisting on doing comedies. We should know by now that we make good cars but we're not the funniest people.
Daniel Bruhl
#45. When I go the cinema, unfortunately nowadays, especially with the big commercial films, the audience is spoon-fed through the entire experience and they don't have to do any work.
Michael Fassbender
#46. What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.
Yann Martel
#47. To me, cinema is not a movie or a TV screen, and it's not a seat in a building versus one in your living room. It's the art of motion pictures.
Ted Sarandos
#48. My absolute favorite song I've ever written is "This Is Where We Came In." It's a nudge at younger listeners, cause at one time you could go into a cinema halfway through a film and then stay through and pick up where you left off.
James Hunter
#49. The enigma of cinema is gone because of the focus on business. As soon as you attach numbers to a film, you limit it. Films are meant to be an escape from reality.
Shahrukh Khan
#51. Foreign audiences are used to seeing Mexico in other sorts of movies. 'Casi divas' is a step toward a more commercially successful cinema, without the violence, blood and exaggerations. The movie reflects a more human Mexico, while remaining a chick flick, although it is not a romantic comedy.
Ana Layevska
#52. 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
#53. Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.
Michael Haneke
#54. Music is the only passion I shamelessly indulge in. However, for recreation I enjoy watching movies. 'Wizard of Oz' was the first film I ever saw, followed by the 'Bond' movies. I also watch a lot of World cinema through DVDs mostly brought by one of my best friends who's now based in Toronto.
A.R. Rahman
#55. I know there is one kind of cinema that exists in the world, that is good or bad cinema.
Raj Kapoor
#56. Cinema is my religion. It is a way to make people sensitive, through emotions. To make them feel, experience empathy. People are touched and act ethically when they are emotionally touched.
Bruno Dumont
#57. My mother is a very big cinema buff, so as a kid, we watched a lot of Indian and Malay films.
Michelle Yeoh
#59. HD is not forgiving. Once you see your face for the first time in a movie cinema, you run straight to the gym.
Sondra Radvanovsky
#60. I didn't want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. 'I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.' I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, 'This is me! This is me!'
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#61. An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.
Federico Fellini
#62. We cannot put cinema in parallel with the political, because politics are something dirty and cinema is not dirty.
Ali Suliman
#63. I am a child of cinema, and I am a cineaste, so everything I do is a reference to something I've heard or experienced or seen. And we all do it, we all steal. The ones who claim they don't, are obviously lying, because you do. You just have to make it your own.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#64. The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.
David Lynch
#65. One gets the sense that, for Deleuze, the cinema of the movement-image has been fully realized while that of the time-image is emergent. Comparatively speaking, there are few "pure" examples of films where direct images of time predominate. Mixed or hybrid examples are more common.
D. N. Rodowick
#66. National film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word 'industry' is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.
Peter Weir
#67. The heritage of a British actor revolves around the challenges of playing the classic roles to meet certain levels of success as an actor. In America, the heritage of an actor is based on cinema mainly.
Brian Cox
#68. 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
#69. Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.
Roger Ebert
#70. Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.
Slavoj Zizek
#71. One of my great all-time loves in cinema, and I've seen it three times, is Bondarchuk's 'War and Peace.' Not a lot of people may have seen that film. It was made during the Soviet era.
Baz Luhrmann
#72. That sort of detailed filmmaking is one, hard to do and not have it be pretentious, and two, have it tell the story, which is what you're taught, that cinema is the language of images and you really should be able to make a film with no dialogue and tell a story.
Nicole Kidman
#73. We have a partnership deal with New Line Records, which is part of New Line Cinema, and ... I worked on that.
James Iha
#75. 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
#76. 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.
Peter Greenaway
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Everyone is looking for a purpose in life. The reason we all go to the cinema or online is because we haven't found a purpose yet. We are always wondering why we're here. But I've learned that we have to create that purpose for ourselves.
Jerome Jarre
#80. A movie is something you see, cinema is something that's made.
Steven Soderbergh
#81. It's hard to say things without coming off in a certain way, but at a young age, I felt very driven. All I ever wanted to be is a soldier of cinema.
Harmony Korine
#82. 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
#84. I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.
Manuel Puig
#85. The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
Yann Martel
#86. Good cinema is what we can believe, and bad cinema is what we can't believe.
Abbas Kiarostami
#87. It was difficult in India to find an eight year old who could play a widow. The reason for that is that most of the children in India are really exposed to Bollywood. It's commercial Indian cinema which is really over the top. To find an actor, or even a non-actor, who felt natural was difficult.
Deepa Mehta
#88. A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#89. My aim is to place cinema among the other art forms. To put it on a par with music, poetry, prose, etc.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#90. 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
#91. I'm under the impression that this notion of decency is disappearing from our society where conflicts are made worse on cinema and on television, where people are nasty and cruel on the Internet and where, in general, everybody seems to be very angry.
Helen Mirren
#92. I could almost say it is my religion. I guess that sounds pretentious, but I want to live and breathe cinema.
Giovanni Ribisi
#93. IN CINEMA IT IS NECESSARY NOT TO EXPLAIN, BUT TO ACT UPON THE VIEWER'S FEELINGS, AND THE EMOTION WHICH IS AWOKEN IS WHAT PROVOKES THOUGHT.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#94. When it's good, cinema can be one of the most important things in a person's life. A film can be a catalyst for change. You witness this and it is an incredibly spiritual experience that I'd never lived before; well, maybe only in a football match.
Gael Garcia Bernal
#95. Although for some people cinema means something superficial and glamorous, it is something else. I think it is the mirror of the world.
Jeanne Moreau
#96. I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
George Hickenlooper
#97. When you're so passionate about cinema, the idea to direct your own film is really appealing.
Gaspard Ulliel
#98. I studied classics, and I find it mystifying that we had Medea and Electra and Antigone and all these amazing characters, and they don't really exist in cinema now. The only person who's really doing it, and he gets loads of criticism for it, is Lars Von Trier.
Alice Lowe
#99. Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped.
Luis Bunuel
#100. Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite.
Crispin Glover
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
