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Film Quotes
"When I watch a movie for the first few times I'm usually thinking about where I was in a given scene, who was next to me, what we were doing etc. But after I've gotten through all of this, when I'm really watching the film itself, then I get moved."
222
"When I was in film school, it was said that all good films were characterised by some form of humour."
186
"I want to do feature films. I am flying to Malaysia to be in another feature film. We will be filming that in Malaysia, the Phillipines, and back in California."
185
"Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined."
Film,
182
"Minority views expressed in films simply don't sell tickets."
163
"I did some film reviews for small papers in Finland and things like that to be able to keep living here."
154
"The French have got to understand that a film is so expensive that it can no longer afford to be regional or even national in scope."
Film,
150
"Lord of the Rings was something I always wanted to do. I read the book when I was about 25, and I was always hoping if it was ever made into a feature film that I would be involved in some way. And then I finally got it, and I was over the moon. It was fantastic news."
113
"John Schlesinger had one of his friends designing it and he had never done a film before. Ten days before it started, they didn't have any costumes. I was rung up and joined up."
112
"Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement."
Film,
111
"There is so much to do on a film set. It is an extraordinarily invigorating and wonderful place to be, when things are running well."
103
"My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam."
83
"Take a film of Jacques Tati like Mon Oncle which has something quite new - for me, unique - in it."
Film,
83
"I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me."
80
"Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined."
75
"When you're on a set it can be very tedious and slow. It's just not as big as when you see it on film."
Film,
75
"The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same."
71
"What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek."
70
"The sound is the key; audiences will accept visual discontinuity much more easily than they'll accept jumps in the sound. If the track makes sense, you can do almost anything visually."
70
"The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself."
70
"I'd like to do a piece of Shakespeare. Any upcoming Shakespeare film. Just a bit to say I did a classic."
67
"I knew nothing about martial arts. And I don't really like it! But in the film, I not only had to pretend that I knew all about it, I had to be the best at it. That was very difficult."
66
"They offered me that film before I did Frida and I said, no, I'm not capable of directing. Then after seeing Julie direct, I was inspired by it. She motivated me to do it, because we don't have role models as woman for directors."
65
"I think everybody dreamt somehow to make a film in Hollywood, you know."
65
"I recently turned down a film that I didn't want my kids to see. Priorities shift. Sometimes I'm sad about that, but not enough to do anything about it."
65
"And if you're a golfer and you watch a golf film and Matt Damon swing, and it's not great, then you're not going to believe in the golf story, you're not going to believe in the rest of the film. That's the whole movie, so if that swing looks like crap, the movie's crap."
65
"I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn't know would never get financing."
64
"The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary."
63
"I'd always tried not to worry about the size of the role or the size of the film."
62
"In Wales it's brilliant. I go to the pub and see everybody who I went to school with. And everybody goes 'So what you doing now?' And I go, 'Oh, I'm doing a film with Antonio Banderas and Anthony Hopkins.' And they go, 'Ooh, good.' And that's it."
62
"I'm not sure I agree with the thesis, because I think that even though something grotesque or gross has been part of film since way back, what we accept or what we can get away with on the screen is broader now."
61
"It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were."
61
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