Haile Gerima Quotes

#1. Well, then, I must say that I do not like him at all. Though it has turned out so well for us, I do not like him at all. As it happens, there is no great harm done, because I do not think Isabella has any heart to lose. But, suppose he had made her very much in love with him?

Jane Austen

#2. There are filmmakers like me in different parts of the world that have a story they want to tell, and it's a story that comes out of a certain historical reality within their own life. Then you get committed all the way and however long it takes, stay very committed.

Haile Gerima

#3. The process is the goal," Kaden responded innocently, trying not to feel smug. It was about time one of those Shin maxims worked in his favor.

Brian Staveley

#4. Analyses of the movie marketplace points to an interesting phenomenon: High-profile movies are continuing to do well year-to-year in the U.S. and overseas - this past summer, for example, the top 10 movies registered at the same level as in '04.

Peter Bart

#5. Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

Jonathan Franzen

#6. You have to have a very strong cash flow for a film to really stay in theaters. You have to have the advertising capacity to sustain and follow the kind of press coverage.

Haile Gerima

#7. Guns are like thermometers, only instead of measuring body temperatures they measure our fear.

Jean Zimmerman

#8. My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.

Tecumseh

#9. I'm organizing documentary films, and whenever scriptwriting gets too tedious I go to my editing room and start to edit the documentary, even if I don't have the full funding yet. So you have to keep yourself busy, you have to like the subject matter.

Haile Gerima

#10. Success is really when you create a space, a piece of art, and people come in and say, that's my story - when they claim it.

Haile Gerima

#11. Tarantino is a spoiled little white kid. He can do any movie he wants and nobody can do anything about it.

Haile Gerima

#12. There's no other way but struggling, forging ahead to do the film.

Haile Gerima

#13. For me, I think [art] exists in a cave. I am in a cave. I have my own editing place, but I'm not powerful enough to amass the resources to keep doing movies every two or three years.

Haile Gerima

#14. When my film went to the Venice Film Festival and won the best script writing, the jury [prize], it didn't go to my head. I know how many black filmmakers that I am operating with whose name will never be mentioned. But I'm part of them in that silent existence.

Haile Gerima

#15. For any movement to emerge, it has to be innovatively independent from the mainstream cinema, and I don't see that much.

Haile Gerima

#16. To me, entertainment is really the new plantation. It's the new sugar, the new cotton, that black people work for somebody else to be richer than them.

Haile Gerima

#17. There's something about being in front of a live audience that's fun. It's a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can't get it anywhere else. And I've been doing it since I was 23, so it's part of my being - it's part of my fabric as a person.

Steven Wright

#18. I really do not care what the white world is doing. I care about black people building the monument on slavery.

Haile Gerima

#19. I think once you have films in certain festivals you begin to have name recognition, and there are possibilities. Especially for independent filmmakers, it's always good to try the international market because it doesn't have the same kind of baggage.

Haile Gerima

#20. First I dream my life. Then I live in that dream with love and joy.

Debasish Mridha

#21. To me the industry has always said that the lovers and haters and principal characters will always be white in Hollywood, and black people will always be appendages of those kinds of dramas, or they will be comedic outlets. It will never change.

Haile Gerima

#22. There has to be consistent emergence of two or three films - narratively, stylistically, consistently demonstrating you are here to go on. And on that kind of basis, I'm not seeing much. I'm just waiting to see.

Haile Gerima

#23. Yet I thought I saw her stand,
A shadow there at my feet,
High over the shadowy land.

Alfred Tennyson

#24. The system knows how to cherry pick black people. It's like affirmative action - once a year, one is recognized. But what has to occur is self-emergence so if they ignore you, you don't have to disappear.

Haile Gerima

#25. A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.

Haile Gerima

#26. I think the hardest thing I've had to learn is that just because people might speak a certain way in real life doesn't mean it's engaging in the theater.

Paul Downs Colaizzo

#27. When the system does not recognize me I'm not devastated.

Haile Gerima

#28. It was scary to think of happily ever after. It was scary to think about trusting someone enough to give him your heart now, hoping he wouldn't break it later.

Rachel Hawthorne

#29. I think not many young people are willing to pay the price of telling their own story.

Haile Gerima

#30. Money? I lost all taste for it.

Taylor Caldwell

#31. 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

#32. Single life is the best life until you get hit by lonely nights.

Jonathan Anthony Burkett

#33. I am not interested only in telling a story, but I want to tell it my way. I don't want my accent, my temperament, my narrative style to be compromised to fit into a mold of the Hollywood type.

Haile Gerima

#34. Inside my head is a tumble of incoherent screams that sound an awful lot like someone speaking in tongues. Apparently my inner voice is Pentecostal.

Rachel Hollis

#35. The physical relationship between CO2 molecules and the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is as well-established as gravity, for God's sakes. It's not some mystery.

Al Gore

#36. If you never did anything for your own freedom, you're not worth a human being in my view.

Haile Gerima

#37. When you don't work together you can't emerge as a force. It becomes what some call a "lonely struggle" and individual self-destruction.

Haile Gerima

#38. 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

#39. Most young people make films to be accepted, to be discovered, when in fact that was the last idea with the group I went to film school with. To be discovered was not our intention. Our intention was to tell our story our way, and make our own mistakes and learn from film to film.

Haile Gerima