Rithy Panh Quotes

There's something special about 'Looking.'

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

A film engages you emotionally and intellectually.

I tend not to be so attracted to films that force me into an intellectual place over an emotional one.

We all do that thing which is the best in movies - we relate.

I wanted to make people feel the same way I feel when I see a good movie.

'Up the Junction' really made me understand the power of cinema to create a vivid sense of a community. When I went on to make 'Bhaji on the Beach,' it was this sense I tried to recreate.

I think a movie is a media that is evoking feelings.

I don't know any form of art or entertainment that can affect people the way movies can. I know it sounds ridiculous, but they can change your world. They can change your views.

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

I wanted to make a film that was sophisticated and emotional, but for a wider audience.

The interesting thing about movies, it's not always - y'know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.

On the sets of the movie 'Manto,' I found that one of the challenges of embodying real-life stories is the mixed medium of facts and imagination, and how one's collage of experiences colour ones representation on celluloid.

I am trying to do films that stay with me for some time. 'Banaras' stays with me.

My films are like drinking a good beer, but pleasure doesn't mean that it cannot change someone's point of view.

I enjoy films like 'American Beauty' and want to do similar films that reflect our culture.

I don't think it's right to define films as commercial or art house. What's important is that a film evokes a certain emotion when it's being watched.

I mean, we should only be talking about the merits of film ["Moonlight"] because one of the great things about the visual language is that it is the great equalizer.

Our jobs as artists is to make sure our art tells a real story and let people see themselves in these characters. It's about having a conversation about being better people.

I think a film is a failure if it doesn't have an emotional effect. That's the film's failure. Not if it doesn't deliver a message, but if it doesn't have emotional effect or visceral effect.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

The films that have influenced me and the films that have motivated me and inspired me were films that resonated, films that made me think after I saw them.

Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.

Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.