NuWell's big thread of cinema quotes

I'll begin by dropping quotes from the cinema world: source from directors, actors, producers, critics, grips, interns, etc.

The camera exists to create a new art and to show above all what cannot be seen elsewhere: neither in theater nor in life; otherwise, I’d have no need of it; doing photography doesn’t interest me. That, I leave to the photographer.
- Max Ophuls (taken from Tag Gallagher's article on Ophuls
http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/ophuls/

What about....

“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.” – Jean-Luc Godard

Obligitory thumbs-up from the Godard fanatic. I don't know how I miss all those.

More Tag Gallagher, this time from an article about the Straubs and Pedro Costa:

"The Straubs tell us how they teach their actors to take time, after the clapboard hits,
'to collect themselves, concentrate, think, meditate, and be one in their body. […] Things don’t exist until they have found a rhythm, a form. The form of the body gives birth to the soul. I’ve said it a thousand times.'
Freedom comes from mastering the mechanics."

http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/featu...traub-huillet/

My favorite is Scorsese's, "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out"

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Mubi

"If you want art, don't mess about with movies. Buy a Picasso." - Michael Winner

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

One day, a journalist asked Mizoguchi if he liked his colleague Ozu’s films, and he replied: ‘Of course.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I think that what he does [filming doors] is much more difficult and mysterious than what I do.’
In Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame [Akasen-chitai, 1956], there’s a girl who closes a door and who looks at you, and the door is closed on you. […] It’s going to be so unbearable [that] a film is no longer possible. It’s terror […]
Fiction is always a door that we want to open or not. […] Fiction is […] when you see yourself on the screen. […] When [you really] see a film, it’s when the film doesn’t let [you] enter, when there’s a door that says, ‘Don’t come in.’ [… Then] you are outside. You see a film, you are something else, and there are two distinct entities.

(From the same Tag Gallagher article about Pedro Costa and the Straubs)

I posted hundreds of my fave film-related quotes here. My daughter Sarah's graduating in May from USC School of Cinematic Arts; I posted this before she was accepted.

"Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let`s say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about five thousand kilometers. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking and what it truly involves than you ever would sitting in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion."

- Werner Herzog

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

"One of the things that wrong with pictures today, I think, is that so many of the people making them started out wanting to."

"You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy."
Peter Bogdanovich

“…we know that, behind every image revealed, there is another image more faithful to reality, and in back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see…” – Michelangelo Antonioni

Tarkovsky has the best (or, at least, most arrogant ) quotes:

"A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work."
― Andrei Tarkovsky

"What is the essence of the director's work? We could define it as sculpting in time. Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not a part of it - so the film-maker, from a 'lump of time' made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image."
― Andrei Tarkovsky

"The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act."
― Andrei Tarkovsky

"I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms. Certainly I am more at home with them than with traditional theatrical writing which links images through the linear rigid logical development of plot. That sort of fussily correct way of linking events usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when the plot is governed by the characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life's complexities."
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theater have time to leave before the main action starts.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

"What is Bresson's genre? He doesn't have one. Bresson is Bresson. He is a genre in himself. Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Dovzhenko, Vigo, Mizoguchi, Bunuel - each is identified with himself. The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin - comedy? No: he is Chaplin, pure and simple; a unique phenomenon, never to be repeated."
― Andrei Tarkovsky

"Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness." - Pedro Almodóvar

Bela Tarr on why he shoots movies in black and white:

"It’s very simple. If you want to make a colour movie, and you go out onto the street, and you want to create the right atmosphere, you must paint the whole street, because every house is red, blue, green and so on. And you have no colours, you just have some colour chaos. For me it’s a kind of naturalism, the colour movie. With black and white you can keep it more stylistic, you can keep more of a distance between the film and reality which is important."

"A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no."

~Werner Herzog

"I started out to be a sex fiend but couldn't pass the physical."

"Years ago, I saved up a million dollars from acting, a lot of money in those days, and I spent it all on a horse farm in Tucson. Now when I go down there, I look at that place and I realize my whole acting career adds up to a million dollars worth of horse *****."

"I've still got the same attitude I had when I started. I haven't changed anything but my underwear."

- Robert Mitchum

"You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well."
Carrie Fisher

"You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart."
Fred Allen (1894 - 1956)

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood."
Fred Thompson

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul."
Marilyn Monroe (1926 - 1962)