New York Film Quotes

#1. It's always really special to be at the New York Film Festival, and always a real privilege.

Noah Baumbach

#2. My enthusiasm for joining the New York Film Academy is predicated on my personal explorations into video as well as a sense of responsibility to share my extended experience of photography with committed students in both mediums.

Ralph Gibson

#3. My brother knows more about film sets than I do, because he works at New York Film Academy.

Elizabeth Olsen

#4. The first time I took acid, I made the decision that I would stay in New York and find an independent film company to get a job with.

Lloyd Kaufman

#5. Gentlemen. You are looking at the true Abraham Lincoln of Arabia. And in order to end our internal bickering - our civil war, if you will - I have solicited your aid.

Leonard Leventon

#6. It was in New York, and I've always wanted to film in New York. And the writer was a teenage friend of mine. We did youth theatre together when we were 16 and always had a dream of making a film together. And ten years later, we've done it. So it's great.

Rosamund Pike

#7. I was thinking of going to London drama schools or to New York, because France didn't accommodate the things I wanted to do in film.

Vincent Cassel

#8. I am a curious creature and put my finger in as many cakes as I can: history, film, technology, etc. I'm also a freak for urban history, particularly Barcelona, Paris and New York. I know more weird stuff about 19th-century Manhattan than is probably healthy.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#9. Next time
we will roll out the red carpet for you in the United States of Arabia, my brethren!

Leonard Leventon

#10. I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.

Frank Rich

#11. I was lucky enough to go to an all-boys prep school in upstate New York that had a film program, so we had access to 16mm Bolex cameras, Nagra sound recorders, Arriflex cameras. We even had an Oxberry animation stand!

Warren Spector

#12. It is possible to work out of New York on film and television and still not lose your connection to theater.

Richard C. Armitage

#13. It was really interesting to be editing the film [Trust] in New York and directing the play in Chicago, and one definitely informed the other. The play probably benefitted more because I realized what scenes could be cut, and I cut those scenes from the play.

David Schwimmer

#14. I approach every film I do in the same way, whether it's an action film or not an action film. I guess if a certain physicality lends itself to action, but I started acting before I reached puberty. I was 7 years old when I started acting. It wasn't until I became a bouncer in New York ...

Vin Diesel

#15. NYU Film School was the way to learn about film, to be exposed to film, to go to repertory houses, to be exposed to New York and see films. I would go to the library and see one, two or three movies a day.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

#16. I had done student films for the School Of Visual Arts and for NYU and all these schools in New York, so those were my first film experiences, but they were student films, so I guess they don't really count.

Guillermo Diaz

#17. The race film had confirmed a dead heat. That was great. But even better, most of the New York press finally learned to spell my name correctly.

Louis Zamperini

#18. My goal as an actor was to work - to be a working actor, whether it was in theater, and, well, I didn't even consider film and television when I was in New York, but what came along, came along.

Stephen Root

#19. Sometimes I get mad when I think that I only have maybe 40 or 50 more springs in New York. When I miss one, 'cause I'm on location for a film, I wanna go, 'That's it, that just cost me one of my 50!'

Topher Grace

#20. I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called 'Film Culture.'

Jonas Mekas

#21. Ford didn't know what to do with Mister Roberts that wasn't repeating what was successful in New York. He was trying to do things to the play that would be his in the film.

Henry Fonda

#22. I don't have many actors in my family, but I do have a Great Uncle that is a film-maker in Philadelphia, and my great-great-grandparents were Flamenco dancers in the 30's in New York, they were Spanish dancers.

Aubrey Plaza

#23. I started writing this feature comedy in New York - a Chris Farley vehicle. The script was decent. When I got to LA, I met some new friends in film school and had them read my script and give me notes.

David Steinberg

#24. What I'd really like to do is do a film or two a year and then do theater in New York the rest of the year.

Piper Perabo

#25. When I graduated from high school, I got accepted to York University, Fine Arts film program.

Mike Myers

#26. I saw 'Brokeback Mountain' in a packed house in Chelsea, New York, when I was filming a Bollywood film there. Chelsea, being a predominately gay neighbourhood, had the most euphoric reaction. I saw couples holding hands and crying at the end. It was the most heartening viewing I have ever been to.

Karan Johar

#27. When I came to New York in 1949, there was already an entire fresh avant-garde film movement blooming in New York and California. It was a very, very exciting period!

Jonas Mekas

#28. When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse in New York with martini glasses.

Tom Ford

#29. 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

#30. Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.

Ishmael Reed

#31. New York is the perfect place for a film festival because there's already so much energy and life here, and New Yorkers love movies.

Clark Gregg

#32. I've realized that what you think of when you make a 'big movie,' if it's actually a green screen movie, it's like doing independent New York theater because you don't have any backgrounds or props. So it's kind of like making the lowest budgeted film you could possibly imagine, plus $100 million.

Emile Hirsch

#33. There's a freedom there and an understanding of my career and the things I've done. I'm seen here as primarily a comic actor, which is OK, but I can go to New York and I do something that's very emotional. It would be lovely at some point to do something like that on film.

Nathan Lane

#34. A great day in New York would be to wake up, get a cup of coffee and head up to Central Park for a nice walk. Then I'd go down to the East Village and stroll around. After that, maybe I'd go check out a museum or catch an indie film at the Angelika.

Emmanuelle Chriqui

#35. Even when I'm alone, my life revolves around film. I think that's why I live in New York, not L.A., where it's so concentrated.

Paul Dano

#36. Most of my life, I thought that I would end up a novelist. But then, in New York City, after college, I started a company with a college friend where we made documentary video for museums. In that capacity, I shot, directed, edited and began to learn the vocabulary of film.

Jon Spaihts

#37. You can shoot a film in New York without seeing the Empire State Building. Or Starbucks ... although the latter is much less realistic.

Kenneth Lonergan

#38. I can live in Paris for four months or London or, you know, Barcelona. These are places that are like New York. But I don't think I could live in many places. When I had to make a film in the United States I picked San Francisco because to me it's one of the great cities of America.

Woody Allen

#39. I really fight hard to make things film where they're supposed to be filmed. If something is supposed to be in New York, then it has to be in New York.

Freddie Prinze Jr.

#40. 'Elf' has become this big holiday movie, and I remember running around the streets of New York in tights saying, 'This could be the last movie I ever make,' and I could never have predicted that it'd become such a popular film.

Will Ferrell

#41. I came to New York to be an actor and I became a film producer first.

Griffin Dunne

#42. I did a film called Dracula and it was very nice because I had lots of trips to New York on Concorde.

Julie Harris

#43. There is a little bit of everybody in everybody.

Leonard Leventon

#44. I never wanted to or expected to make a film outside of New York. New York became very, very expensive. The same $18 million spent in Barcelona or Rome goes much further there.

Woody Allen

#45. One thing I really want to do is - I spent ten years in New York doing theater before I moved to L.A. to do TV and film. I'd really like to go to back New York and do some theater.

Rainn Wilson

#46. February 5: Laurence Olivier, his agent Cecil Tennant, and playwright Terence Rattigan arrive in New York to discuss with Marilyn a film of The Sleeping Prince, to be produced in London with Olivier and Marilyn in the starring roles.

Carl Rollyson

#47. If you look at professional baseball in New York, you can get all 162 Yankee games on television anytime you want. But people still go to the ballpark because they are two different experiences. It's the same with film.

Patrick Whitesell

#48. I'll be vilified if I shoot a film in Toronto for New York. And rightfully so!

Spike Lee

#49. In New York, I get people coming up to me because 'The History Boys' was such a hit on Broadway, and they show the film all the time on cable over there, so people recognise you.

Samuel Barnett

#50. Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.

Jonas Mekas

#51. I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.

Patrick Marber

#52. I'm from New York, and yet I've done only one film executive-produced by Spike Lee and have never done a film that Spike Lee directed. I've never done a film that Keenan Wayans has directed, or Bill Duke.

Ving Rhames

#53. I left my parents' home when I was 22, I moved to New York with my ex-girlfriend. We did a film together with Raul Julia.

Demian Bichir

#54. Gradually the live TV scene simmered out, replaced by film, and that took place in L.A. So many actors left New York.

William Shatner

#55. The reason I took Early Edition - besides the fact that I liked it - was that it enabled me to start a production company in New York City. It's a low-budget film company to produce and direct movies.

Fisher Stevens

#56. New York is the greatest character actor ever. Any film that is shot in New York is elevated by the city.

Jeffrey Wright

#57. Besides film, I'd like to be the young Regis. That would be great. Going back and forth from L.A. to New York. Doing stuff on food. Doing stuff on kids. Just talking about issues that are relevant. Doing things on the Olympic Games.

Apolo Ohno

#58. I began auditioning for acting jobs at the ripe old age of 12. Thirty years later, including a 15-year run on television, I sometimes just get offers for work. Often, however, I am still required to run pell-mell around Los Angeles or New York, interviewing for film and TV jobs.

Diane Farr

#59. No one could have predicted on day one of rehearsals, that a year and a half later we would have shot a film and all be living in New York. It was surreal.

James Corden

#60. When the film was presented in New York, the distributor reproduced the fountain scene on a billboard as high as a skyscraper. My name was in the middle in huge letters, Fellini's was at the bottom, very tiny. Now the name of Fellini has become very great, mine very little.

Anita Ekberg

#61. I began to exercise a lot of cinematic muscle with the precepts I had learned in the New York art world. Film was intriguing. I began to think of art as elitist; film was not.

Kathryn Bigelow

#62. I did New York, I Love You which is a very personal film for me. My most personal film, but it's not like a film I've ever made. I would never do that film as a feature, for instance, because it's not very commercial of an idea.

Brett Ratner

#63. We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you.

Marisha Pessl

#64. I think I would say 'The King's Speech' is surprisingly funny, in fact the audiences in London, Toronto, LA, New York commented there's more laughter in this film than in most comedies, while it is also a moving tear-jerker with an uplifting ending.

Tom Hooper

#65. I always wanted to do films. I'd gone to New York early in 1976 and did a lot of theater, but I really wanted to chase the paths of people like Pacino and Lemmon and those guys. Alan Arkin. Film was where I wanted to go.

Jeff Daniels

#66. I don't go home and pretend I'm August rather than just the actual lines I'm saying in the film. If you do it that way, it makes it more natural and second nature. After awhile you get used to it and there's so much, especially being in New York to film; you're always surrounded by American people.

Freddie Highmore

#67. New York is my home and I have a particular fondness for it. I think it's a place where you can generate any kind of story wonderfully. But I also would be very happy to make a film in Paris or Rome.

Woody Allen

#68. Suddenly I was writing a lot of screenplays, and I was no long in New York, so I stopped acting in plays, and it just became too tricky to find a part to play, either in a play or a film that coincided with my schedule writing and or directing.

Michael Cristofer

#69. I've never seen a theater community to rival that of Chicago. Neither New York nor L.A. has the raw talent or integrity that Chicago theater has, and I think it's because Chicago doesn't have Broadway or the film and TV business to distract it.

Nick Offerman

#70. When you do bigger jobs there's more attention and when you film in New York you get loads of paparazzi everywhere. It affects your work because you're trying to think about the person you're acting with and you've got 20 other lenses taking pictures of you at the same time, and it throws you.

Carey Mulligan

#71. If I could film, we'd film every episode of 'Doctor Who' in New York. I have an affinity with the city. It has some wonderful locations and it is devastatingly vast and huge. Central Park looks amazing on camera.

Matt Smith

#72. I started in theater; I did theater in New York for 14 years before I even thought about doing movies - I never thought about being in a film; it just never occurred to me.

Lin Shaye

#73. New York is a character, all on its own, and whenever you film there, it becomes part of the show. That's just the nature of being there.

Hunter Parrish

#74. I did theatre a lot when I was a kid. Then I went to acting school in New York. I did a lot of behind the scenes in college. I wanted to learn while I had the time. I studied theatre and film in different capacities.

Justin Bartha

#75. I wanted to stay in New York to pursue acting, but my dad urged me to get a four-year degree. Reading about the film school at Florida State University, he suggested I go there. I received my bachelor's degree in 2003.

Lauren Miller

#76. It's difficult to do a genre film well, and it doesn't matter if you're talking vampire movies or 'Dawn of the Dead' or 'The Thing' or 'Escape From New York.' Those kind of movies, they understand what the old-school B-movie is supposed to be, they get the throwback of it.

Ethan Hawke

#77. After 'Gremlins' came out, I should have packed up everything, moved to Los Angeles from New York, and dedicated myself to being a full time film actor. I had the world at my feet.

Zach Galligan

#78. The film itself involves a New York City radio storyteller, Gabriel Noone, who strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, an abused 14-year-old teenager who is suffering from AIDS, who does not have much longer to live.

Armistead Maupin

#79. Well, it's a little harder in New York. It's not as forgiving to a film crew. You hold up a bunch of New Yorkers who can't cross the street, they're not going to take it well. Southern California? They'll wait. It's cool man. In New York, they're like, 'Are you kidding me? I gotta get to work.'

Matthew Rhys