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If my films make one more person miserable, I'll feel I have done my job.
-Woody Allen
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Curiosity doesn't matter any more. These days people don't want to be transported to emotional territories where they don't know how to react.
-Hector Babenko
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The people are unreal. The flowers are unreal, they don't smell. The food is unreal, it doesn't taste of anything. The whole place is a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set, built up in the desert.
-Ethel Barrymore, on first arriving in Hollywood, 1932
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
-John Berger
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Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness.
-Ingmar Bergman
Laterna Magica
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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 on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
-Robert Bresson
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Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.
-Robert Bresson
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Nobody in TV makes as much money as Robert Redford, who likes to make movies for several million dollars only on the condition that they contain some sort of social message. I cannot take very seriously a social message delivered by an actor who is paid nine million dollars to deliver it, and who charges you five dollars to see it.
-David Brinkley
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When we were growing up and saw a Ray Harryhausen movie, we were interested in how it was done. But thank God we got to go through the magic of seeing it before we knew how it was done. You were able to get this beautiful, pure, visceral response to something without knowing too much about it.
-Tim Burton
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I made some mistakes in drama. I thought the drama was when the actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.
-Frank Capra
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If you stick with a vision, it might not all work, but some of it will be absolute genius. To me, 15 minutes worth of absolute genius in a film is so much better than two hours of mediocrity. I would rather pay to see something different like that.
-Kim Cattrall
In The New Vulcan Woman, STARLOG Yearbook, by Adam Pirani, 1995.
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The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.
-Raymond Chandler
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The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.
-Raymond Chandler
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Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.
-Charlie Chaplin
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All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
-Charlie Chaplin
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
-Jean Cocteau
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If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema.
-Serge Daney
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Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
-Don Delillo
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It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, They lived happily ever after and the following quarter-century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know it just might work.
-Nora Ephron
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Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there, still and meditative in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen.
-Federico Fellini
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Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can't teach old fleas new dogs.
-Federico Fellini, "Atlantic Monthly", December, 1965
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All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
-Jean-Luc Godard
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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
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As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless -- and absolutely essential.
-William Goldman
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A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.
-Samuel Goldwyn
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Books about Film / Filmmaking / Movies
