Great quotes from film directors

[Popcorn_Bliss]

Why not start with a handful by the greatest of them all? Mr. Alfred Hitchcock!

"You don't need to go to a film school to learn how to make movies. I never did. You want to learn how to make films? Rent every one of Alfred Hitchcock's pictures and watch them carefully..."
- William Friedkin

"I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. And I think that students should be taught to visualize. That's the one thing missing in all this. The one thing that the student has got to do is to learn that there is a rectangle up there and it has to be filled".
- Alfred Hitchcock

"Film your murders like love scenes, and your love scenes like murders".
- Alfred Hitchcock

"I'm full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm".
- Alfred Hitchcock

"Our primary function is to spark an emotion. Our secondary function is to sustain that emotion".
- Alfred Hitchcock

"Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film".
- Alfred Hitchcock

"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints".
- Alfred Hitchcock

"Two people will not always reveal their inner thoughts to one another, but the eyes will always reveal what they are really thinking".
- Alfred Hitchcock

[Rayjaymay]

"Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie"
-Jean-Luc Godard

"The camera lies all the time -- lies 24 times/second."
-Brian DePalma



Not about movies but it's just a great quote...

"Life is a combination of magic and pasta."
-Federico Fellini

[lesco]

"A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say" - Michael Winner

[Michael24]

"Pain is temporary, film is forever." - Robert Zemeckis

[The Debts]

"Sex is boring unless you're doing it."

- Ridley Scott on why most of his movies don't have sex scenes.

[Moviefan2k4]

"I had a sign above my office that read "verisimilitude", because the picture had to have its own honesty. Everyone had to believe it was real." ~Richard Donner on the making of Superman~

"This is a movie about love, hope, faith and forgiveness. He died for all mankind, suffered for all of us. It's time to get back to that basic message. The world has gone nuts. We could all use a little more love, faith, hope and forgiveness." ~Mel Gibson on Passion of the Christ~

[Packerfan75]

"Cut" - all of them

[Popcorn_Bliss]

"The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle".
- Stanley Kubrick

[imsounoriginal]

"All love scenes that are started on the set are finished in the dressing room." -- Alfred Hitchcock.

[Popcorn_Bliss]

Originally Posted by imsounoriginal

"All love scenes that are started on the set are finished in the dressing room." -- Alfred Hitchcock.

That's another one I love! I almost added it...

Hitchcock has a wealth of good ones...

[Ernest Rister]

"I had to adapt to what was happening, had to figure out how to make your weaknesses your strengths."
-- Francis Ford Coppola, on directing Apocalypse Now, and every possible thing that could go wrong went wrong

"Over at our place, we don't make movies to make money. We make money to make movies."
-- Walt Disney

ED BRADLEY
One of your contemporaries who has chosen to remain anonymous had this to say. There is a place for Steven Spielberg and his mass audience entertainment, but his films should never be confused with art.

STEVEN SPIELBERG
Sometimes I hear comments like that and think they are pretentious in and of themselves, because someone is trying to tell you what art can and can't be. Who is to say art can't be an emotional experience? Who is to say art can't be E.T. flying over the Moon?

[Popcorn_Bliss]

"It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else".
- David Lynch

"I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint... a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much".
- David Lynch

[Talleyrand]

It's bad enough paying a guy $200 to f**k your girlfriend, then he can't get it up.

-Abel Ferrara

[Himmel]

Usually, when special effects get in the way, it's because the story isn't strong enough. If you don't start with a strong screenplay, it's easy to fall back on special effects, thinking it's going to carry you. But it never works. It's just tiresome. - Sir Ridley Scott

[cinemaphile]

"A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing." - George Lucas

[Mahatma]

Originally Posted by cinemaphile

"A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing." - George Lucas

Who knew he had irony

[Just Jimmy]

Sure, Kill Bill's a violent movie. But it's a Tarantino movie. You don't go to see Metallica and ask the f#ckers to turn the music down. - Quentin Tarantino

[cinemaphile]

Anything ever said by Uwe Boll

[Coenskubrick]

"Our ability, unlike the other animals, to conceptualize our own end creates tremendous psychic strains within us; whether we like to admit it or not, in each man’s chest a tiny ferret of fear at this ultimate knowledge gnaws away at his ego and his sense of purpose. We’re fortunate, in a way, that our body, and the fulfillment of its needs and functions, plays such an imperative role in our lives; this physical shell creates a buffer between us and the mind-paralyzing realization that only a few years of existence separate birth from death. If man really sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie….But even for those who lack the sensitivity to more than vaguely comprehend their transience and their triviality, this inchoate awareness robs life of meaning and purpose; it’s why ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,’ why so many of us find our lives as absent of meaning as our deaths.

The world’s religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache; but as clergymen now pronounce the death of God and, to quote Arnold again, ‘the sea of faith’ recedes around the world with a ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,’ man has no crutch left on which to lean—and no hope, however irrational, to give purpose to his existence. This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism — and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong — and lucky — he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

-Stanley Kubrick

[Ernest Rister]

"Shut up, Shelley."
-- Stanley Kubrick