Life Is A Film Quotes

#1. Pass the popcorn, please. Life is a film, theatre, a theatre of the soul. We play different roles on different stages. At death, we walk offstage. At birth, we walk onstage.

Frederick Lenz

#2. I come from the theater, so for me rehearsal is vital and a way of life. There are many film directors who don't believe in it and some actors who prefer not to rehearse.

Hugh Jackman

#3. There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#4. We made a film about the need for silence and withdrawal ... and here we are at the epicentre of noise and excitement. Life is full of surprises.

Pawel Pawlikowski

#5. 'Pride' is my first film with a happy ending. Before, I naively thought they were a cop-out, but now I've come to believe that happy endings and wish fulfilment are an incredibly important part of our cultural life.

Joe Wright

#6. I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life.

Abbas Kiarostami

#7. Well, everything is constantly evolving and changing. That's what life is all about. But basically Hollywood has lost its focus as a film center. Films are now made all over the world.

Kenneth Anger

#8. The whole thrust in my life right now is spinning my assignments around and making them work in a more personal way ( ... ) I wanted to go back and do the original thing: one camera, one lens, one film. You really have to put yourself in a position of danger to be creative.

David Alan Harvey

#9. Making a film is so hard that if you don't have your main actors going along with the ride with the rest of the crew it can make your life very difficult.

Alan Parker

#10. It's very strange what happens when I start working for a film. In my life I've done a lot of stuff - I did a lot of dance music, a lot of TV shows and lots of different types of films - and every time it is a new experience.

Claudio Simonetti

#11. What can possibly be the common factor in a Kim Jee-woon film? I think what really ties a lot of my projects together is that there is always a character that believes his life is not exactly the way he wishes it to be.

Kim Ji-woon

#12. Sometimes I ask myself questions... Sometimes I ask myself, is this your real life or is this just a pilot film? Is my life a thirty-nine week series or is it a special?"
"Whatever it is, your ratings are down... Five cents, please!

Charles M. Schulz

#13. Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' is a magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers.

Roger Ebert

#14. A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors and then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form.

Robert Bresson

#15. I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realising all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.

Peter Greenaway

#16. There is violence in real life but I would never impose violence in a film just to attract the audience.

Abbas Kiarostami

#17. Your personal life is something that's gonna last forever, and your career in stage, film, television, whatever, is not necessarily going to do that, so to keep the two separate's a very good thing.

Lucy Griffiths

#18. The life of a film is very strange. Once the film is done, you wish you could forget about it and move on.

James Gray

#19. It is important to know that what I do is not artistic. I am just a film-maker. I live how I live and I do what I do, which is recording moments of my life as I move ahead. And I do it because I am compelled to. Necessity, not artistry, is the true line you can follow in my life and work.

Jonas Mekas

#20. I've had much more down in my life than I've had up. And much more struggle. First of all, when I went into the film school everybody said, "What are you doing? This is a complete dead-end for a career."

George Lucas

#21. A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality?

Jack Valenti

#22. In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

Alfred Hitchcock

#23. 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

#24. 'Bagdad Cafe' was a film that changed many, many people's lives ... how they saw themselves and how they looked at their life situation. I thought I made a little movie. All the mail that I get is about how it changed lives, and that's wonderful.

C. C. H. Pounder

#25. I'm not going to live my life unhappy and why should he and we talk about it and I think what's great about the film is that it shows is the meaning of family doesn't have to be as traditional as it once was, like you can make a family.

Nia Long

#26. Ninth grade is a minor inconvenience to him. A zit-cream commercial before the Feature Film of Life.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#27. Any film which views the darker side of life, which is death with a sense of humor, is very much to my taste.

Carter Burwell

#28. I wouldn't want to do a Bollywood film per se, but I would like to do an Indian-language film. For some reason I think Bollywood has become synonymous with commercial cinema, which is song and dance and everything that is larger than life, and I am interested in the reality.

Freida Pinto

#29. It's not my plan or whatever in my life to be a sex symbol. It never is. You are who you are, but you can't help what you look like. And when you do a film, like for me, it's just not about that. I would prefer to downplay it. I prefer to downplay the sex appeal.

Jessica Biel

#30. I like to make big decisions when I am at home living a routine life, getting up, walking my dog, having breakfast, when I have no pressure. I do not like doing it when I making a film. It is too stressful.

Paul Walker

#31. If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.

Michael Ondaatje

#32. It was the sort of situation that would be ever so charming and warmly human in a film with Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith but that sort of film is only charming because they leave out so many details, and real life is all the details they leave out.

Russell Hoban

#33. 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

#34. All I can say about Juliette of the Herbs is that it has made me look at how my life is now, still close to the earth, but not close enough ... I'm happy to have seen a glimpse into her life. It encourages me to live as radically as I want. Tish's film is a grand one.

Janisse Ray

#35. In a funny way, acting, to me, is all make-believe, even if the film has unicorns in it or is a normal movie that can be set in real-life time. I'm still imagining that I'm a different character, so it's all, in a funny way, like fantasy.

Elle Fanning

#36. My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

Robert Bresson

#37. So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it's fast and sometimes it's slower, and maybe what's happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it's gotten to the point where I can't hear between the beats anymore and it's just a hum.

Steven Soderbergh

#38. My grand plan is that I can master having a better life by making sure I have a regular flow of songs. Then I can give myself time to tour or celebrate or write a film score.

Imogen Heap

#39. There still seems to be a lack of film for the baby boomer generation, if you'd like to call it that. And I think 'Martin Bonner' showed what's possible. Later in life, when you've been working at something for a long time, to actually get some kudos for what you do is wonderful.

Paul Eenhoorn

#40. When I look at the 'Rocky Balboa' film when I played the undisputed heavyweight champion, I feel like art is going to imitate life. I played the champ in a movie and I'm going to become the champ in reality.

Antonio Tarver

#41. The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage.

Andrzej Wajda

#42. For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

Akira Kurosawa

#43. I have only recently got interested in film, and it is a strange way of working in many ways. But actually, when it is at its best, it's quite an extraordinary way of working between a director and an actor, to really explore an inner life.

Dan Stevens

#44. I think the struggle, whenever you make a film or television movie based on a real person's life, is finding a dramatic arc that will hold an audience's attention.

Ted Danson

#45. The Ordinary is Extraordinary ..." my motto for life as a writer/Mom/woman

Lisa Barr

#46. It is quite surreal having a film made about your life. The whole process of turning real life into drama is interesting in itself, but even more so when it is your own life being put into the narrative forge.

Heather Brooke

#47. It's one thing to put on your nation's uniform to give your life for your country. But to dress up in black-market khakis and head into battle in a borrowed bush hat, armed only with a Nikon camera, 10 rolls of film and notebook, is definitely another thing.

Peter Arnett

#48. Life to most of us is just a jumble of sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end.

Anthony Burgess

#49. Music is a big factor in helping the illusion of the film come to life. The same way music brings back different periods of our lives.

Francis Ford Coppola

#50. Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

Alan Rudolph

#51. It always seemed to me like it was a significant thing to do with one's life to be an actor 'cause I love movies and I felt like, not to be grandiose about it, but there is something important about film with the function it provides to general society.

Charlie Hunnam

#52. The process of composing the film score for each movie is completely different. They all have their own personality and their own completely different life, but there's never been a formula. Each time, it's a new thing.

Trevor Rabin

#53. You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.

Nick Cave

#54. For me, animated film is about magic. This is how magic becomes part of daily life, invading daily life.... Magic enters into a quite ordinary contact with mundane things ... (making) reality seem doubtful.

Jan Svankmajer

#55. In the almost film-like flitting-by of modern life, a man needs something to tell him, from time to time, that he is still himself, and nothing can give him this assurance in so comforting a manner as the "four feet trotting behind".

Konrad Lorenz

#56. This isn't to play down people who pursue acting ... For me, I do acting just as a fun job. It is a phenomenal job, and I have fun doing it, but I relate more to my martial arts, to my baseball, to my film study. There are more facets to my life that I relate to.

Ryan Potter

#57. I wanted to make a film - and I've been wanting to do this for 16 years - about life in care, and bring it to the public's attention, because I had never seen anything, on TV or in the cinema, which said: 'This is how it feels to be a kid in care'.

Samantha Morton

#58. Cinema has become my life. I don't mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

Pedro Almodovar

#59. I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

Robert Towne

#60. Everybody said I was good, but being known and not having a big film success is almost tougher than being completely new. It just kind of turned my life around and was definitely a highlight.

Jack Nicholson

#61. Life is like a B-picture script. It is that corny. If I had my life story offered to me to film, I'd turn it down.

Kirk Douglas

#62. Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.

Jean Baudrillard

#63. You are always invested in a film, but there is always a different feeling you get when you are portraying a character that is based on real life and you are re-telling events that actually took place.

Martin Henderson

#64. Just making a movie the way 'All is Lost' had to be made was a great experience, because it was structured differently than any other film I will make for the rest of my life.

J. C. Chandor

#65. There's to be a film about my life. I can give this as an exclusive now. Meryl Streep was offered the part but, no, I wanted Kate Winslet. Kylie Minogue is playing me in middle age. In old age, I'm not sure who's going to play me. I haven't got there yet. Perhaps Cate Blanchett. Or Jacki Weaver.

Barry Humphries

#66. I like black and white films. I don't exactly know why - probably because there is a stylization which is removed from actual life, unlike a color film.

Norman McLaren

#67. All the best bits of a film happen when I'm looking down at my phone. Life, is similar.

Craig Stone

#68. When I was shooting the film I did not see the story as an everyday tale or a social one. To a great extent, the film is a mythological look on human life. This is probably what I would like the audience to keep in mind before they enter the screening room.

Andrey Zvyagintsev

#69. To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.

Chester Elijah Branch

#70. I didn't want to go down the route of spending a year of my life making a movie that would never be seen. I may as well go down a route making a film that a lot of people will see, which is the whole idea behind cinema.

Ridley Scott

#71. As an actor, variety is the spice of life. I love theatre ... it's what I enjoy the most. But a bit of TV, a bit of film, a bit of stage - what more could you ask for?

Max Irons

#72. I like a film that makes the audience feel like they are in the middle of life as it is moving, and in a way, they are catching up. They are thrown into things.

Ira Sachs

#73. I'd say that 'Tree of Life' is not a Christian so much as a spiritual film.

Brad Pitt

#74. The film that changed my life is a 1951 film by Vittorio De Sica, 'Miracle in Milan.' It's a remarkable comment on slums, poverty and aspiration.

Beeban Kidron

#75. I don't think there is any one route to directing ... Other than that I think you just have to think 'By any means possible' and take any job you can that will get you experience. I also did a lot for free. I got paid virtually nothing for my first film, but it changed my life.

Mary Harron

#76. The past is unclear. It's as if there is a film over those early years. I can't even be sure that the things I remember happening really happened to me.

Raymond Carver

#77. I did theatre all my life and then went into the film world. I then kind of segued into TV land, which is a different experience.

T. J. Thyne

#78. I don't like to see projects that are all black or all white. It's how life is. I do like to make sure that I do a nice black family film; that's like keeping my home base. I do other things, but I like to always come back to a positive family film, because of all the negative influences today.

Vivica A. Fox

#79. Sundance is going to be a defining moment in my life. But the unfortunate thing about Sundance is, when you have a film there, you can't have the opportunity to see other films.

Gavin O'Connor

#80. 'Skyline' is an alien invasion film that really takes an interesting look at the genre. The writers did an amazing job of creating a new take at how life from other planets come and plan to invade Earth.

Eric Balfour

#81. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.

Lawrence Lessig

#82. The reason we love nature is because it's fascinating and we love all the creatures, but if you watch any nature film, there's always a lesson: "the creatures are all dying and life sucks." The same is true of literature.

T.C. Boyle

#83. Films are dreams. Many, many critics say to me that my films are not good because they are too unbelievable, but this is my style. I tell stories like they are dreams. This is my imagination. For me, it would be impossible to do a film that is so precise, that resembles real life.

Dario Argento

#84. I'm building a career as big as humanly possible so I can be in a 'Star Wars' project. My life goal is to have a character in the 'Star Wars' universe, film or other media. I just want to go to my grave knowing I played some character or some character based on my likeness was part of that world.

Rahul Kohli

#85. I think life is so difficult to catch, it's so furtive, that a copy, a film, can in no way catch it and represent it.

Abbas Kiarostami

#86. I was one of those avid moviegoers as a kid, and we didn't have video, so we went to see everything five times. I went to see every foreign film playing in my town. As times went on, I watched a lot less films. I have a different film school now. My film school now is my life experience.

Jodie Foster

#87. When you're a kid, I think you want to be a film star. And I'm not as enamoured with that any more. The reality of that life is a lot of travel, and a lot of being away, which is impractical because I have four children, so I don't want to be away that much, not the other side of the world away.

Rob Brydon

#88. When making a film, I'm never concerned about whether the theme is new or whether it's been done before in cinema or not. I'm led to make films if there's a theme that interests me or I experience something in my own life that confronts me with something that I want to deal with.

Michael Haneke

#89. If he didn't fall in love he would have never come back near the end of the film. Because, what man is going to dishonor himself so that he comes back in front of the man that took a woman away from him ... and warns her to save her life?

Rod Steiger

#90. I think that I'm very passionate, and I know that if I decide to do a film, my character is going to take over my life.

Noomi Rapace

#91. Luck is everything ... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

Alfred Hitchcock

#92. 'The Wine of Summer' is a beautiful film about love lost and found, and the complexities of life while discovering who you are. It was filmed primarily in and around Barcelona, and the imagery is breathtaking.

Kelsey Chow

#93. Politics is not my life. I have a career in radio and another career in film.

Jesse Ventura

#94. A film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.

Roger Ebert

#95. I am interested in costume. Clothes in your daily life are important: your choices say something about you, even if what they're saying is about non-choice. And what you wear in a film is crucial.

Clemence Poesy

#96. Your life is a story. Write the one you want to read.

A.D. Posey

#97. The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

#98. Film is something that came later into my life. I had a Jesuit education, and I consider acting and the theater as kind of a calling - a vocation.

Michael Moriarty

#99. When I see myself on film it makes me smile, I mean making a good living doing what I enjoy is soo much fun. I just hope that everyone has the chance to enjoy life like I do.

Adrienne Barbeau

#100. 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