Best 122 quotes in «filmmaking quotes» category

There's always been this strand of filmmaking in Britain which is like socialist neo-realism. That's always been there. I've never been part of that, really; I've been much closer to fantasy.

To be animating at the same time, it's the ultimate freedom in filmmaking because you can literally put anything on the screen that you can imagine.

To make filmmaking interesting to me, I want to keep learning things.

The test audience holds a great deal of power in the process of filmmaking in the United States.

We actually try our best to be non-biased, but for me, that was the best movie ["Sicario"], filmmaking-wise and storytelling-wise, and connected to me the most. I thought it was great.

What I do like is hiking. And that's what filmmaking is. It's a hike. It's challenging and exhausting, and you don't know what the terrain is going to be or necessarily even which direction you're going in... but it sure is beautiful.

What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?

What's great about documentary genre, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary.

Why I'm interested in filmmaking is because a moving image is very, very powerful when it comes to changing human behavior.

When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.

All FILM directors are good actors, because you have to understand actors in order to program them.

All film technique, I am convinced (and like many of my theories I am probably alone in adhering to it), originates in dreaming. We could dream slow motion before the moving camera was invented. In our dreams we could cut between parallel actions, we assembled montage shots long before some self-important Russian claimed to show us how. This is where film derives its particular power. It re-creates on screen what has been going on in our unconscious.

Wong Kar-Wai is a really great inspiration. He's always referred to as the Jimi Hendrix of filmmaking.

All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.

A movie is not a movie, it is a potential nuclear furnace of inspiration, courage and conscience.

As important as color is to a painting, or wings to a bird. Music injects vibrancy to film and makes it soar!

Don’t let the daily routine kill your creativity. Remember who you were before you got that job.

Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about.

A number of Chinese filmmakers, including Chen Kaige and Li Shaohong, imitated Zhang's visual style in the early 1990s by multiplying various erotic images of the oriental Other for global consumption. Consequently, these films, usually sponsored by multinational corporations and catering to the tastes of global audiences, can be perceived as following the same model -- the Zhang Yimou model. To a great degree, this model also marks the end of formal experiment for the Fifth Generation directors because they must adopt a much more conventional way of filmmaking in order to meed the demand of the global market.

Audience can live without a movie but a movie cannot live without an audience.

Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.

Filmmaking is not the work of the weak-minded. It may not be rocket science, but it requires ten times more strength of the mind than that.

Film gives us a second chance at a first impression.

Filmmaking has the power to fortify the feeble, unify the divided, raise the abandoned and inspire the ignorant.

Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness.

Gratitude is the gateway to a positive life.

Healthy entertainment is a beautiful blend of stimuli that can connect with the viewer at a sentimental level, then sow the seeds of a certain idea or feed the mind with inspiration and courage. In short, healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. This leads to not only an entertained viewer, but also an inspired soul. And that should be the purpose of film-making, and indeed the entire entertainment industry, rather than feeding the general population with garbage.

If you can film an idea in your mind, follow that film idea shot for shot, scene for scene, that idea is worth making.

If you can film an idea in your mind, follow that film idea shot for shot, scene for scene and enjoy it, that idea is worth making for the world to see. It can change someone's life.

Film analysis enables us to recognize how the filmmakers have their magic on us, how all the constituent elements of the film have combined to create that magic. Rather than rob us of the pleasures of watching films, this approach affords us the even greater pleasure of deep engagement

Greatness is achieved through kindness, compassion, and love.

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction.

I am not an actress. I am a mistress of disguise. Acting happens to be one of the perks

i Create. I don't "Need". Meaning: I don't need advice or criticism. Unless you're offering money, weed, or whiskey save it. Thanks.

If you think that you can hide what your interests are, what your prurient interests are, what your noble interests are, what your fascinations are, if you think you can hide that in your work as a film director, you're nuts.

If you cannot live with hope and create with intention or be kind to a stranger, bury your head. You are not living at all.

It’s difficult to really like a film that you didn’t like making.

In major movies these days, the fine details of music, instrumentation and sound design are lost. This is a shame, and it is one of the various reasons that make me not want to be part of the entertainment business. Although I have done it in the past, finally I know that I'm not here to create industry products. Music is more than images, it's more than language... it's the medium that's capable of communicating the answers to the Big Questions.

It's not important whether you worked hard or not. Ultimately it's about how the movie is. Nothing else matters.

Make films that purify the soul with the flow of rational, vigorous and compassionate thinking.

If you don't lose first you are not entitled to win.

It was hard to know what to make of the brothers' dark infatuation with death. It was strange, wildly anomalous in sun-baked Southern California, where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows.

Make movies my friend – make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul.

[On Dr. Strangelove]: My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. [...] What could be more absurd than the very idea of two mega powers willing to wipe out all human life because of an accident, spiced up by political differences that will seem as meaningless to people a hundred years from now as the theological conflicts of the Middle Ages appear to us today?

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it.

Oscar may be the world’s most glorious way of honoring your work, but the real award for a filmmaker is the contentment which you receive from making your film.

Music is the final piece of filmmaking—the essential element that pulls emotion from an audience and puts the goosebumps on the screen.

Regardless of the subject of my films … I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see a man weeping at the bus stop, when I observe people struggling vainly to get close to others, when I see someone eating up the left-overs in a cheap restaurant, when I see the first blotches on a woman's hand and know that she too is bitterly aware of them, when I see the kind of appalling and irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face. I want this pain to come across to my audience, to see this physical agony, which I think I am beginning to fathom, to seep into my work.

Some people take pretty pictures of nothing. I'd rather record grime that means something.

Scaring the audience is easy. We've Sound Effects. Hardest is to horrify the viewer with the atmosphere/properties that are familiar to them.