Film Quotes

“Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Meet me in Montauk...”
― Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script

“It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.”
― David Gilmour

“After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.”
― Harmony Korine

“There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting.”
― Sara Sheridan

“Women think in [Douglas] Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly.”
― Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“Patience is the essence of clicking great Photographs!!”
― Abhijeet Sawant

“I broke up with this girl, and they put me with a psychiatrist who said, 'Why did you get so depressed, and do all those things you did?' I said, 'I wanted this girl and she left me.'

And he said,'Well, we have to look into that.'

And I said, 'There's nothing to look into! I wanted her and she left me.' And he said, 'Well, why are you feeling so intense?'

And I said, 'Cause I want the girl!' And he said, 'What's underneath it?' And I said, 'Nothing!'

He said, 'I'll have to give you medication.'

I said, 'I don't want medication! I want the girl!'

And he said, 'We have to work this through.'

So, I took a fire extinguisher from the casement and struck him across the back of his neck. And before I knew it, guys from Con Ed had jumper cables in my head and the rest was...”
― Woody Allen

“Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?”
― Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

“Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it.”
― Frank Lentricchia, The Sadness of Antonioni: A Novel

“Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“If you are great, El Topo is a great picture. If you are limited, El Topo is limited.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Long after people forget what you said or did, they’ll remember how you made them feel.”
― T. Rafael Cimino, A Battle of Angels

“Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?”
― Werner Herzog, Of Walking on Ice

“Ever director has at least 10 bad films in them.”
― Robert Rodriguez, Rebel Without a Crew: Or, How a 23-year-old Film Maker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player

“Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose.”
― Ann Brashares, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

“In my experience there are billions of dollars available for pieces of shit. As soon as the material distinguishes itself by something interesting, financing becomes a problem.”
― Rutger Hauer

“R means under 18 accompanied by an adult. Therefore all corporately funded films in the US must be made with the concept that those under the age of 18 are able to view the film. This means all corporately funded films in the US are made for the eyes of children.”
― Crispin H. Glover

“AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively-i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that bad cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.”
― Roger Ebert

“In this image-driven age, wildlife filmmakers carry a heavy responsibility. They can influence how we think and behave when we’re in nature. They can even influence how we raise our kids, how we vote and volunteer in our communities, as well as the future of our wildlands and wildlife. If the stories they create are misleading or false in some way, viewers will misunderstand the issues and react in inappropriate ways. People who consume a heavy diet of wildlife films filled with staged violence and aggression, for example, are likely to think about nature as a circus or a freak show. They certainly won’t form the same positive connections to the natural world as people who watch more thoughtful, authentic, and conservation-oriented films.”
― Chris Palmer, Shooting in the Wild: An Insider's Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom

“No one could honestly say that a musical makes sense.”
― Siegfried Kracauer

“The camera has a mind of its own--its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera's gaze--the camera's domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human temporality. Intrusion occurs, but the camera remains transfixed by its object. It doesn't care. The camera has no human fears.”
― Frank Lentricchia, The Sadness of Antonioni: A Novel

“Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“Bing: You’re a heel…a low down rotten heel…anything that doesn’t go your way, anything that you can’t have you destroy.”
― John O'Hara, BUtterfield 8

“Žižek seems to have got Hitchcock out of his system, if not out of his unconscious—one never does that.”
― Fredric Jameson

“Vulnerability is the portal to feeling. Feeling is the portal to strength.”
― A.D. Posey

“If everyone knows so much about it, why do they need to make a documentary?”
― Brigid Pasulka, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True

“It is a quintessential example of the whirling kinetics that drive a Keaton film, in which not just the medium but the human body- the permutations of the sinews, the shock of the limbs -seems infinitely elastic, an unruly instument to be wilded with a cheeky kind of grace.”
― Edward McPherson, Buster Keaton: Tempest In A Flat Hat

“...she found it made things easier if she dramatised them. Or melodramatised them. It was easier, for example, to face the fact of Uncle Philip if she saw him as a character in a film, possibly played by Orson Welles.”
― Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop