Quotes About Film Noir

#1. I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.

Claire Denis

#2. I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I'm sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.

Camille Paglia

#3. One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.

Roger Ebert

#4. I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

Werner Herzog

#5. Barbara Stanwyck, in particular, was peerless in everything from high and low comedy to drama to musicals to film noir. She never took a false step.

Eve Golden

#6. When we say 'cinematic', we tend to think John Ford and vistas and wide-open spaces. Or we think of kinetic camera movement or of a certain number of cinematic styles, like film noir.

Lenny Abrahamson

#7. I'm working on something that's not yet novel-shaped but is something of a film-noir-flavored 'Alice in Wonderland.' It will also very likely be a single volume story and not the start of a series.

Erin Morgenstern

#8. [on Springsteen's "Stolen Car":] A kind of mystical film noir, written by Kafka and shot by Polanski.

Adam Sweeting

#9. He had a face right out of film noir, a face meant to be shot in black and white, parallel shadows of venetian blinds slashing across it, a plume of cigarette smoke spiraling beside it.

Khaled Hosseini

#10. There were some things that I found I really enjoyed singing about; like, on the title track, there's this film-noir character of a woman who's sort of losing it in a room.

Diana Krall

#11. Film noir has a mood that everyone can feel. It's people in trouble, at night, with a little bit of wind and the right kind of music. It's a beautiful thing.

David Lynch

#12. Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.

Paul Schrader

#13. I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

Marie Windsor

#14. With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it.

Lana Wachowski

#15. Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.

Pauline Kael

#16. I'd love to play a femme fatale in a film noir. I'm thinking of one of those roles that Lauren Bacall or Bette Davis might have played. What I wouldn't like is to suddenly find myself being cast, as many senior actresses seem to be, as the abbess in a convent.

Diana Quick

#17. Old film-noir movies. There's something comforting about watching black-and-white movies, and hearing this kind of music just puts me in a fantasy world. It's a really great escape for me.

Petra Haden

#18. I'm into clothes, but in a way that's related to wanting to walk into a film noir movie. You know, I love to go to vintage stores, but mostly it's stuff that I don't have anywhere to wear ... I don't have the life that goes with the clothes.

Maureen Dowd

#19. Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.

Wesley Morris

#20. That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.

Lawrence Kasdan

#21. Billy Wilder is really is a heavy influence on Bound. We felt that film noir was a genre where you could create a really contained story. We wanted to be on a set as much as we could to get the kind of style level we were looking for.

Lana Wachowski

#22. You and I are black and white - a film noir, filled with gestures, poignant and tender

John Geddes

#23. There is something missing in a lot of digital filmmaking, something I call "poetic reality." That's something you see played out in film noir, where the technique establishes the mood.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#24. I think the original Matrix was really incredible. It was so original and it did so many innovative things with film. It was a much bigger film. Bound was just a smaller film. It was kind of like an old noir film.

Gina Gershon

#25. Blaming Obama for Iraq violence is like blaming Daniel Craig because Octopussy sucked.

John Fugelsang

#26. Art is community's medicine for that worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness

Robin G. Collingwood

#27. There's shames a man can never reason away, though he looks back and piles up reasons over them forty dozen deep. And maybe those are the shames a man never should reason away.

Ken Kesey

#28. She was a cute as a washtub.

Raymond Chandler

#29. It's possible to make sense of what's morally at stake in an appreciation of the gift of life, or the gift of a child, without necessarily presupposing that there is a giver. What matters is that the gift - in this case, the child - not be wholly our own doing, our own product.

Michael Sandel

#30. A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet.

Raymond Chandler

#31. Americans are not getting screwed by the Republican Party. They're getting screwed by the large corporations that bought and own the Republican Party.

Molly Ivins

#32. The weak can often become strong in the hands of the unscrupulous.

Charles Kingston

#33. I detest the word plot. I never, never think of plot. I think only and solely of character. Give me the characters; I'll tell you a story-maybe a thousand stories. The interaction between and among human beings is the only story worth telling.

Stirling Silliphant

#34. Either you're going to shoot us or you're not. The ball always lands on red or black, never both.

V. Alexander