Gurinder Chadha Quotes

In a film, you have to externalize things that are internal and of course it becomes a debate about to what extent you do that.

My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.

I'm not a purist - I like films that are narrated and films that aren't, films that are beautiful and films that are clumsy but heartfelt. Mostly, I just like a good story and good characters.

Movies are too literal.

A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.

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.

My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.

What I like about film is it explores imperfections.

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.

My personal fave is 'The Japanese Wife', because I think I achieved a lot of what I wanted to do. I wanted that Japanese minimalism in the film, which I managed to get somewhat.

The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like 'Breaking the Waves,' or as light as it gets, like 'Jerry Maguire,' 'Election' or 'Toy Story.'

That's what I wanted to do... I wanted to make a great film that just happened to be based on a video game.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

It's always a challenge to adapt a novel for screen, a visual medium.

I love when you get the feeling of some social reality with a fictional film.

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.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

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.

Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.

People are mistaken to view cinema as some sort of gimmick. It's very much ingrained in the ways in which we understand each other.

'City of God' and 'Slumdog Millionaire' are both films that I really like, but they are stylistically the opposite of what I wanted to do.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.