Filmmaking Quotes

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out”
― Martin Scorsese

“The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.”
― D.W. Griffith

“Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read...if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.”
― Werner Herzog

“When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit.”
― Robert Rodriguez, Rebel Without a Crew, or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player

“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.”
― Krzysztof Kieślowski, Kieslowski on Kieslowski

“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 onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.”
― Dziga Vertov

“The crew was mostly men. That's how it was and that's pretty much how it still is. It's a man's world & show business is a man's meal with women generously sprinkled through it like over-qualified spice.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.”
― Kelly Marcel & Sue Smith

“The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way.
Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.”
― Robert Bresson

“Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important.”
― John Cassavetes, Cassavetes on Cassavetes

“I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.”
― Peter Greenaway

“Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.”
― Darlene Craviotto, An Agoraphobic's Guide to Hollywood: How Michael Jackson Got Me Out of the House

“Meanwhile, back at reality..."- G.Lucas”
― Robert Lynn Asprin, Sweet Myth-Tery of Life

“Most of the movies are working like, 'Information, cut, information, cut, information, cut' and for them the information is just the story. For me, a lot of things [are] information - I try to involve, to the movie, the time, the space, and a lot of other things - which is a part of our life but not connecting directly to the story-telling. And I'm working on the same way - 'information, cut, information, cut,' but for me the information is not only the story.”
― Béla Tarr

“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.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“When I looked at life through the camera, I felt like I could finally see it.”
― Katherine Howe, The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“Harvey Weinstein took pride in not paying bills,” recounted Miramax’s former chief financial officer John Schmidt. “But when you stiff a filmmaker you are stiffing the very lifeblood of what your business is. The whole independent film business is based on championing the small guy.”
― Ken Auletta, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

“Trying to make a movie is a tawdry, soul-crushing, stress-inducing, backstabbing, sleep-deprived, caffeine-overdosed nightmare—and that's just Tuesday.”
― Don Roff

“Keep in mind that a person says only ten percent of what lies in his head, ninety percent remains unspoken”
― Constantin Stanislavski

“I want to create the type of cinema that shows by not showing. This is very different from most movies nowadays, which are not literally pornographic but are in essence pornographic, because they show so much that they take away any possibility of imagining things for ourselves. My aim is to give the chance to create as much as possible in our minds, through creativity and imagination. I want to tap the hidden information that’s within yourself and that you probably didn’t even know existed inside you.”
― Abbas Kiarostami

“Hindi films are known and enjoyed worldwide for their songs and dances. These days it is fashionable to battle tradition by using a Western format of telling stories, where music stays in the background. I can't wrap my head around it. I don't think it helps the story move forward. I also believe that a film gets a lot of repeat value when an actor is wooing an actress with a popular song. We represent a dream world and our audiences love it. It may seem old-fashioned but I firmly believe that lip-syncing (by an actor) is the best way to picturize a song, to maximize its appeal. It simply does not have the same magic when the song is played in the background.”
― Rishi Kapoor, Khullam Khulla: Rishi Kapoor Uncensored

“Cameras have a special kind of magic. You can reframe the familiar and make the everyday seem extraordinary. That's why I adore them.”
― Rebecca Ryder, The Dream To End All Dreams

“Each time, the fall looked brilliant and effectively dangerous against the green screen, but he wasn’t satisfied until he stuck the landing and heard the rebound clap. Everyone from riggers to grips marked the occasion with good, honest cheers reverberating in the giant, hollow cube.”
― Laurie Perez, Unbraiding: Actor | Producer | Father: A Story in Three Strands

“Well, Strictly Business (1991) got one of the highest ratings ever from a test screening - and that movie was a piece of shit.”
― Spike Lee

“Scottish film culture - or, more accurately, its discrete sections - has been highly politicised in the past. The problem has been the nature of the politics in question. Take Scottish filmmaking as example. On one hand, Scottish film workers have presented a picture of individualist effort which would gladden the heart of Margaret Thatcher and which, theoretically at any rate, should have produced a great variety of films of very diverse aesthetic and, therefore, political tendencies. On the other, however, these same film workers were forced to compete with each other for limited funds disbursed by a few key Scottish institutions of patronage, the powerful voices of which, historically, have been extremely reactionary. Small wonder, then, that Scottish films critical of established aesthetic forms, cultural atitudes and political arrangements have been the exception rather than the rule.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“The first time Polly Platt met Jim Brooks to discuss Terms of Endear­ment (1983), she was distinctly unimpressed. “I was infuriated that he was that late,” she recalls. “Fifteen minutes or half an hour, who cares, but to be a whole hour late.” She waited for him at Gladstone’s, a tacky tourist joint on the Pacific Coast Highway. “I just remember I didn’t like him ... I just didn’t like his turn of phrase ... I didn’t like the way he referred to the people. I didn’t like the people he was talk­ing about working with.”
― Rachel Abramowitz, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: The Truth About Female Power in Hollywood

“Like many junior executives, Dawn Steel served as punching bag/chum for her bosses. Once the marketing chief, Frank Mancuso, asked her to tell Steven Spielberg the release date of one of his movies; Spielberg immediately retorted, “Who are you to tell me when the release date is?”
― Rachel Abramowitz, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: Women's Experience of Power in Hollywood

“If I were to be asked what is most lacking and what I would most like to see in Scottish filmmaking today, I would say the union of the king of mis-en-scene which is steeped in cinematic history and gives us maximum cinematic pleasure, with a hard political analysis of Scottish history and contemporary Scotland.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays