Best 122 quotes in «filmmaking quotes» category

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.

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.

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

Success or Failure, there should always be a Drive to Keep on Creating.

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

Take the clapper and become the alarm that the world so desperately needs.

People never forget two things, their first love and the money they wasted watching a bad movie.

That which is cool is driven by the soul.

The art of filmmaking is the most influential form of art that has ever existed throughout the history of human artistic endeavors.

The best documentaries are independent. They don’t exist to serve interests, philanthropic or otherwise.

The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.

The difference between extras and audience members is that audience members don’t get chairs. Audience members are the daylaborers of the industry. When it's sunny, we stand in the sun. When it’s cold, we stand in the cold.

The filmmaking process taught me that I need to be authentic—in my scripts and in real life.

... the midpoint of each film is the moment when each protagonist embraces for the first time the quality they will need to become complete and finish their story. It's when they discover a truth about themselves.

Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.

The only reason some people think finding investors is difficult is because they don't know where to look. Think about this: people with money--millionaires even--are around you every day, whether you recognize them or not. Everybody--even your friend who works at McDonald's--has some sort of paycheck. It may be two hundred dollars or it may be two hundred thousand dollars, but almost everyone has a source of income. The question is: what do they DO with that income?

This distinction between form and experience is not pedantic, but fundamental: a form can express the Transcendent, an experience cannot. A form can express the common ground in which all things share. An experience can only express one man's reaction to that common ground.

To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed.

Use filmmaking for a greater purpose, than to just entertain some drowsy minds. Wake the whole world up with your movies. It has been sleeping for long. Its eternal sleep has become its darkest nemesis. Now is the time to wake it up.

Transform into your dream.

Use filmmaking to eliminate racism – use to it terminate misogyny – use it to destroy homophobia and all other primitiveness.

Vanessa insisted that film was exactly like poetry. Nothing necessarily had to happen; you just had to feel something.

Walk into the unknown with what you know in your heart.

We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas for an I-Pad. Celluloid isn't just nostalgic, it's an art form and, like it or not, it's superior to digital. It lasts much longer, it provides grain and brighter colors, and it takes more effort so that it produces something wonderful. With the inferior binary codes, pixels and untested shelf-life of digital files, plus the fact that these days anyone with a digital camera, even a two-year-old, can make a video and pollute the world with self-photography and cat pictures, film has a lot more integrity and worth than digital.

Whatever genre you deem suitable for your taste – romance, comedy, action, mystery, sci-fi or anything else, make sure it has the plain everyday human kindness.

When an image depends on the next for a complete meaning, it moves the story and audience along without choking them with pathos

With a camera, a microphone, and sufficient cash, you, too, can craft your own version of the world and emblazon it with a premium of fear over facts. (Be warned though: Paranoid schizophrenia makes for compelling film, but it's no way of life.)

Without art, a film is pure wastage of time and resources.

As far as art and filmmaking is concerned, I don't see there's any separation; it's just one continuous thing.

Filmmaking for me is always aiming for the imaginary movie and never achieving it.

Success involves failing first. Ask any successful person. Ask any experienced person, really. It's all part of the creative process, so sit back and allow the artist within you to sprout, blossom and flourish. You must accept that your first, second, and third attempt at something might suck. It's a necessary step in improving your skill. Failure is your teacher, not your judge.

When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet he's worried either about his story or his ability to tell it.

Without writers, stories would not be written, Without actors, stories could not be brought to life.

You’re my mascot, Paper Moon.” I was too tired to object. We both knew I was more than a mascot. I’d worked for my brother since I was eleven, for six long years. “You should stop calling me that,” I said. “I love that name.” “P.M. and her dad were crooks. It gives it away.

Ben Affleck inspired me and reignited my love for acting and filmmaking. It was a big part of getting me to a place where I felt inspired to make my own movie.

Be what we make, and not who we are.

Directing, editing, and everything about filmmaking has definitely changed me as an actor.

Documentary filmmaking ruins you for real life, because you learn to be extremely attentive.

Filmmaking is a real craft.

Filmmaking is incredible introspective. It forces you to sort of examine yourself in new ways.

Filmmaking is to me very similar to being in a café somewhere in Paris and looking at the people walking by.

Filmmakers now have the freedom to create the type of movie they want. More screenwriters, directors, and producers now have the chance to see their words on screen now that VOD and streaming outlets are available. Overall, it's a good thing for filmmaking and documentarians.

Filmmaking is the ultimate team sport.

I always think of comedy as being spontaneous, and yet everything about filmmaking is not spontaneous.

However, that old mode of Polish filmmaking virtually disappeared.

For me writing and filmmaking is a therapeutic process. It reflects themes that I'm going through at a time in my life.

I always wanted to live in L.A. The other thing that always inspired me was movies; that's why I'm here. I always wanted to be a part of the movie business and make movies. That's why I went to AFI grad school for filmmaking.

I don't know if I would call it therapy, but filmmaking is really the only thing I know how to do. For me, making movies is a way to bring on change for myself, and I really enjoy that part.

I'd come into filmmaking as a painter so, for me, making 'Good Will Hunting' was experimental because I didn't know how to do it.

I'd say I'm definitely an actor first and foremost, but I love filmmaking.