Filmmaking Quotes

Filmmaking is not the work of the weak-minded. It may not be rocket science, but it requires ten times more strength of the mind than that.

A lot of film people are like that– especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them. It's not about art or ideas. It's about working at something and making it come out right.

The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself.

The varying physical characteristics of the actors may also necessitate changes. Sean Connery is six feet four. Dustin Hoffman isn't.

Music is the final piece of filmmaking—the essential element that pulls emotion from an audience and puts the goosebumps on the screen.

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

Make films that purify the soul with the flow of rational, vigorous and compassionate thinking.

If you cannot live with hope and create with intention or be kind to a stranger, bury your head. You are not living at all.

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.

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.

Yet in recent years I have witnessed a new phenomenon among filmgoers, especially those considered intelligent and perceptive. I have a name for this phenomenon: the Instant White-out. People are closeted in cozy darkness; they turn off their mobile phones and willingly give themselves, for ninety minutes or two hours, to a new film that got a fourstar rating in the newspaper. They follow the pictures and the plot, understand what is spoken either in the original tongue or via dubbing or subtitles, enjoy lush locations and clever scenes, and even if they find the story superficial or preposterous, it is not enough to pry them from their seats and make them leave the theatre in the middle of the show.But something strange happens. After a short while, a week or two, sometimes even less, the film is whitened out, erased, as if it never happened. They can’t remember its name, or who the actors were, or the plot. The movie fades into the darkness of the movie house, and what remains is at most a ticket stub left accidentally in one’s pocket.

Healthy entertainment is a beautiful blend of stimuli that can connect with the viewer at a sentimental level, then sow the seeds of a certain idea or feed the mind with inspiration and courage. In short, healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. This leads to not only an entertained viewer, but also an inspired soul. And that should be the purpose of film-making, and indeed the entire entertainment industry, rather than feeding the general population with garbage.

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

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

I am not an actress. I am a mistress of disguise. Acting happens to be one of the perks

A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress.

The score is in your subconscious. Sit down long enough at a keyboard and it will come out.

Greatness is achieved through kindness, compassion, and love.

Make movies my friend – make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul.

Don’t let the daily routine kill your creativity. Remember who you were before you got that job.

That which is cool is driven by the soul.

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.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect

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.

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

In order to get [Mean Streets] made I had to learn how to make a movie," says Scorsese. "I didn't learn how to make a movie in film school. What you learned in film school was to express yourself with pictures and sound. But learning to make a movie is totally different.

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.

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.

Transform into your dream.

Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about.

Later film shoots’ casting calls would advertise that they’re “fun shoots” and a “good way to get exposure”—but working in entertainment is not entertaining, even though it is not what’s traditionally thought of as “work.” You know what’s fun, indie filmmakers? Being paid for your time.

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.

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.

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

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.

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.

Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness.

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

When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit.

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.

If you don't lose first you are not entitled to win.

Filmmaking has the power to fortify the feeble, unify the divided, raise the abandoned and inspire the ignorant.

Oscar may be the world’s most glorious way of honoring your work, but the real award for a filmmaker is the contentment which you receive from making your film.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out

Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important.

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.

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction.

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.

Gratitude is the gateway to a positive life.

Audience can live without a movie but a movie cannot live without an audience.

As important as color is to a painting, or wings to a bird. Music injects vibrancy to film and makes it soar!

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

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

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

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.

A movie is not a movie, it is a potential nuclear furnace of inspiration, courage and conscience.

It was hard to know what to make of the brothers' dark infatuation with death. It was strange, wildly anomalous in sun-baked Southern California, where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows.

If you can film an idea in your mind, follow that film idea shot for shot, scene for scene, that idea is worth making.