336 Film Quotes

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.

Directors and writers have a lot of stress as well, because they have people they answer to.

Well, I think every film student goes into film school thinking they want to write and direct their own movies, and they don't realize how much goes into it, and what a process it is.

Well, I think that a lot of times when you're working on a film, there aren't really opportunities to get to know all the people you have to work with.

I was particularly stunned by the casting of [Tom] Cruise, who is no more my Vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.

Sundance is weird. The movies are weird - you actually have to think about them when you watch them.

The Bollywood distribution system is so corrupt that they have trouble making money off movies. So they sell shoes that an actress stepped in. If they turned up the amps some, maybe they could sell the actresses.

Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?

Working with Martin Scorsese was an absolute minute-by-minute education without him ever being grandiose about it.

Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh - they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh's Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia.

I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.

I don't care if you call it AO for Adults Only, or Chopped Liver or Father Goose. Your movie will still have the stigma of being in a category that's going to be inhabited by the very worst of pictures.

A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality?

I think in art, but especially in films, people are trying to confirm their own existences.

Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. 'Brick' was a good script just to read. It was like, 'Oh my God, these words feel so good in my mouth.' A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In 'Brick,' the world is born from the words.

Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.

Bertolucci is extraordinary in his ability to perceive, he's a poet...he is very easy to work for.

Although it is a fantasy film, it's as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth.

A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.

The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can.

I have a daughter who's 11 years old. Maybe she'll grow up independent and really really heavy and become a movie star and she'll play me in my life story.

I cannot bear to look at a film that I made before 1990. Maybe 1985. There's no sense even trying to explain it. I really just can't watch myself. I see all the machinery at work and it just drives me nuts, so I don't look at anything.

I like racing but food and pictures are more thrilling. I can't give them up. In racing you can be certain, to the last thousandth of a second, that someone is the best, but with a film or a recipe, there is no way of knowing how all the ingredients will work out in the end. The best can turn out to be awful and the worst can be fantastic. Cooking is like performing and performing like cooking.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.

It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.

Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.

Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.

Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.

I don't really know what is shocking. When you tell the story of a man who is beheaded, you have to show how they cut off his head. If you don't, it's like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line.

In the Canadian film Hardcore Logo, a Canadian punk rocker suggests 'Faster, Leonard Cohen! Die! Die!' as a possible band name. This also refers to the film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.

To her British lover about to climb in bed with 80-something Mae: She said that she hoped soon to be able to say what Paul Revere said - 'The British are coming'. This was the last one-liner Mae ever uttered on film.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

Film contains potentialities for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamt of.

You should have told him (Jewison) to get Topol's son!

Ran (film)

Like Freud, Hitchcock diagnosed the discontents that chafe and rankle beneath the decorum of civilization. Like Picasso or Dali, he registered the phenomenological threat of an abruptly modernised world. - Peter Conrad

We tested a lot of people and when Heath came along, he had the same manly qualities Mel Gibson had as a young man. They're never really boys; they already have it

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Don't get me wrong, I love Schindler's List, but it's not like 'Hey man let's get loaded and watch Schindler's List.' - SModcast 4: Can I get a (Masturbatory) Witness

Here's a story: There was a documentary filmmaker who was making a documentary film about education in America. And he's shooting across this classroom with lots of people, kids, who are completely distracted at the television in the back of the classroom. When they get back to the editing room, they realize that on the television, you can barely make out the show for two seconds; it's 'The Simpsons,' Homer Simpson on the screen. So they call up Matt Groening, who was a friend of the documentary filmmaker, and say, you know, Is this going to be a problem? It's only a couple seconds. Matt says, No, no, no, it's not going to be a problem, call so and so. So they called so and so, and so and so said call so and so. Eventually, the so and so turns out to be the lawyers, so when they got to the lawyers, they said, Is this going to be a problem? It's a documentary film. It's about education. It's a couple seconds. The so and so said 25,000 bucks. 25,000 bucks?! It's a couple seconds! What do you mean 25,000 bucks? The so and so said, I don't give a goddamn what it is for. $25,000 bucks or change your movie. Now you look at this and you say this is insane. It's insane. And if it is only Hollywood that has to deal with this, OK, that's fine. Let them be insane. The problem is their insane rules are now being applied to the whole world. This insanity of control is expanding as everything you do touches copyrights.

Austin Powers in Goldmember

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

So I Married an Axe Murderer

Skye Sweetnam at the Internet Movie Database

Seven Samurai

Good Will Hunting (1997)

Duck Soup

Citizen Kane