Movie Making Quotes

Filmmakers Talk About Their Craft

• The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.
• Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Illuminations (1968), p. 239.

• A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
• Jean Cocteau Esquire, (Feb. 1961).

• I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.
• Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (1930), p. 52.

• … a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries, … a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence,… which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.
• Georges Duhamel, describing cinema, Scènes de la vie future (1930), p. 58.

• American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.
• Sergei Eisenstein (1957) Film form [and]: The film sense; two complete and unabridged works. p. 196.

• I always say a screenplay is the big plain pizza, the one with tomatoes and cheese. And then the director comes and says, “You know, it needs some mushrooms.” And you go, “Put mushrooms on it.” And then the costume designer throws peppers on it, and – and pretty soon, you have a pizza with everything on it. And sometimes it’s the greatest pizza of your life and sometimes you think, “Well, that was a mistake. We should have left it with only the mushrooms.”
• Nora Ephron, writer/director, in the documentary Dreams on Spec.

• American motion pictures are written by the half-educated for the half-witted.
• St. John Ervine Ney York Mirror(June 6, 1963).

• Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure.
• Federico Fellini, Atlantic Dec 1965.

• The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all, that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open, has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?
• Federico Fellini [on the Decline of Cinema], a Fellini Lexicon, (1992).

• A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.
• Federico Fellini, [Recipe for a Good Film], a Fellini Lexicon, (1992).

• The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.
• Jean-Luc Godard, Quoted in Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1970).

• Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
• Jean-Luc Godard, Le Petit Soldat (film) (direction and screenplay, 1960)
• [variation] Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second.

• A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.
• Samuel Goldwyn Quote (Sept. 9, 1956).

• If you want to be a storyteller, be an author, be a novelist, be a writer, don't be a film director. Cinema is not the greatest medium for telling stories. It is too specific, leaves so little room for the imagination to take wing other than in the strict directions indicated by the director. Read "he entered the room" and imagine a thousand scenarios. See "he entered the room" in cinema-as-we-know-it, and you are going to be limited to one scenario only.
• [[Peter Greenaway], "105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.

• If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!
• Werner Herzog Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980).

• Film is not the art of scholars, but illiterates.
• Werner Herzog Herzog on Herzog.

• As you see [filmmaking] makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone – just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns.
• Werner Herzog Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980).

• The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.
• Pauline Kael, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang".

• A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
• Stanley Kubrick, Kagan, Norman (1989), The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, New York: Continuum Books.

• Photography because of its causal relationship to the world seems to give us the truth or something close to the truth. I am skeptical about this for many reasons. But even if photography doesn't give us truth on a silver-platter, it can make it harder for us to deny reality. It puts a leash on fantasy, confabulation and self-deception. It provides constraints, borders. It circumscribes our ability to lie — to ourselves and to others.
• Errol Morris, "Not Every Picture Tells a Story," November 20, 2004

• There is only one thing that can kill the movies, and that is education.
• Will Rogers (1949) The Autobiography of Will Rogers.

• Well, Jack Warner may have been celebrated for calling writers "Schmucks with Underwoods," but 20 years earlier, Irving Thalberg … said, "The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it."
• Steven de Souza in the documentary Dreams on Spec.

• Watching violence in movies or in TV programs stimulates the spectators to imitate what they see much more than if seen live or on TV news. In movies, violence is filmed with perfect illumination, spectacular scenery, and in slow motion, making it even romantic. However, in the news, the public has a much better perception of how horrible violence can be, and it is used with objectives that do not exist in the movies.
• Steven Spielberg, in an interview by the Brazilian magazine Veja (1993).

• I honestly don't understand the big fuss made over nudity and sex in films. It's silly. On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it?
• Sharon Tate Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders (2000) by Greg King

• A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking - it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it.
• Francois Truffaut interview in Peter Graham's The New Wave (1968).

• A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins.
• Orson Welles

All the above from: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Film