Great Cinema Quotes

#1. I've found music over the course of my life is slightly more astoundingly inspiring than great cinema

Mark Romanek

#2. Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.

Robert Wyatt

#3. I'm at peace with myself. My film just may please audiences. At any rate, it's already a great prize to be part of just 16 films among all of the world cinema out there. I'm tranquil and satisfied.

Michel Ocelot

#4. I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

Peter Greenaway

#5. There's a great charm in theatre; I enjoyed doing it for twelve years and did lots of plays. At this chapter of my life, I am a cinema actor, and I would like to continue to be so, and at some point I would return to the theatre.

Boman Irani

#6. I spent 15 years of my career trying to convince people that Indian cinema is relevant. I am so proud of Indian cinema and I am so proud of my Indian roots. The IIFAs are doing a great job to this effect.

Shekhar Kapur

#7. Dancer, bride, runaway wife, radical filmmaker and pioneer -
Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema.

Manohla Dargis

#8. More than an actor, I am a performer ... I'm a great believer - honestly so, shamelessly so, vulgarly so - that cinema is for entertainment. If you want to send messages, there's the postal service.

Shah Rukh Khan

#9. 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

#10. I'm very fond of the British cinema. I'm a big fan of Martin Campbell and Daniel Craig. I actually find Daniel very inspirational, especially on the physical side of things. He really inspired me to get back into shape when I started to add on a few pounds. I think he's a great role model.

Steven Bauer

#11. 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

#12. Cinema is, of course, the great storytelling medium of modernity.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#13. There's a great danger in making this seem more important than it is, this whole Free Cinema thing.

Karel Reisz

#14. I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium.

Peter Greenaway

#15. To me, the art of cinema is the same as the art of painting. The artist takes a 2D medium and gives you the illusion of depth. If you look at any of the great paintings, you have the illusion of depth. Which is part of the art. The same with the great movies.

William Friedkin

#16. When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors.

Mike Leigh

#17. I definitely felt that I was put at a very high place to be able to be a part of such a wonderful franchise in cinema history, so I was definitely very driven at doing a great job and having my body look the way it should and just being a part of the creative process.

Kristanna Loken

#18. Kati with an I was a New York Times Critics' Pick and I was really happy that it got a run uptown in Harlem at the Maysles Cinema, which is a great space but isn't necessarily the most well attended for a week-long screening.

Robert Greene

#19. The Lego Movie: Merely a great film, or the greatest film ever in the history of cinema?

Christy Lemire

#20. American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.

Ben Dreyfuss

#21. I think the first British actor who really worked well in cinema was Albert Finney. He was a back-street Marlon Brando. He brought a great wittiness and power to the screen. The best actor we've had.

Anthony Hopkins

#22. Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, women - we're all trying to find our place in this world of cinema and television and theater. And the great thing with comedy is that most of the time, you could be orange. It doesn't matter, as long you're funny.

Sandra Bullock

#23. I came to Hollywood and I loved it. It was a great time, but in my head I was still elsewhere, in Europe. I believed in a certain cinema, which I still do believe in - a certain European cinema - and as a young woman being in America, I thought I was being taken away from that.

Valeria Golino

#24. The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

V.S. Naipaul

#25. On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why?

Gurinder Chadha

#26. 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

#27. We're losing film, especially in projection, we're losing a great achievement of civilization. A still image and darkness make up 50% of the experience. The still images become movement in your head. That's the magic of cinema.

Laszlo Nemes

#28. People know that I have a great love for cinema. Not just for commercial cinema, but for the 'cinema d'auteur.' But to me, two of the great 'auteurs' are actually actors and they both happen to be French. One is Alain Delon and the other is Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Harvey Weinstein

#29. I've always been a big proponent of point of view in cinema. Not necessarily that the point of view has to be subjective, but that in all great films the point of view has been taken into account and established.

John Hyams

#30. Cinema is mass media, it is both overtly gross and exciting. It is our great mirror of society.

Nicolas Winding Refn

#31. If you're not making epic, archetypal films on some level, I think you're wasting a great potential of cinema.

Alexander Payne

#32. The idea that cinema can be dangerous is a great idea.

Michael Moore

#33. Stepping into the "shoes" of someone's life other than my own, great movies such as Cinema Paradiso, scenic landscapes, the work of Daniel Day-Lewis, the books of Joel Goldsmith, traveling, doughnuts, ice cream.

Reggie Lee

#34. My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I'm a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, 'Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!' and I took that as a great compliment. That's exactly my intention.

Joni Mitchell

#35. 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

#36. Rotten Tomatoes is such a great website, in that it has one foot in the Internet world and one foot in the cinema world, and it keeps its grounding between them just perfectly.

John Lasseter

#37. It is clear that through the partnerships between Global Cool and the International Indian Film Academy, Indian cinema has the potential to provide great leadership by exciting its enormous and enthusiastic audience to do their bit to save the planet

Prince Charles

#38. French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.

Louis Leterrier

#39. Even the great bad guys in cinema history, they're likable.

Balthazar Getty

#40. Our group has been in Asia since 1981 in mining, oil and gas. Now we want to mine not silver and gold, but great stories and people, and change the world of cinema, and we want to do that by walking in the footsteps of Wu Tianming.

Robert Friedland

#41. I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#42. During the course of a day, some dark feeling comes, maybe some sadness comes, some thrill, some great happiness, some strange humor. Cinema can embrace all that in one story, just as the story of life.

David Lynch

#43. This is what we have all come to Cannes for: for something different, experimental, a tilting at windmills, a great big pole-vault over the barrier of normality by someone who feels that the possibilities of cinema have not been exhausted by conventional realist drama.

Peter Bradshaw

#44. American films, it's a money-making industry. And in France, you can find great respect for cinema as art.

Woody Allen

#45. The power of the story sheds a light and great perspective on well known facts. The power of cinema draws on that collective history.

Cate Blanchett

#46. I've worked with a lot great directors who have huge resumes, but I'm really trying to be active in my career in supporting the new generation of cinema. I like taking some time to try to support and be a part of that.

Michael Pitt

#47. I wouldn't use the word 'scared' for my role as Hitchcock, but it was my most insecure. Taking on such a formidable, giant personality such as Hitchcock; he was one of the great geniuses of world cinema. Sheer genius.

Anthony Hopkins

#48. And having those mystical elements you see in Asian cinema and certainly Asian martial arts cinema, it's something that we wanted to begin to introduce - the idea of spirituality and the idea of there being something else out in the world besides people who are great fighters.

Alfred Gough