Art Films Quotes

A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that. But if you go to foreign films, if you go to documentaries, if you go to independent films, if you go to good films, you will become a better person because you will understand human nature better. Movies record human nature in a better way than any other art form, that's for sure.

You know, the art films would usually be more, I mean the exploitation movies would usually be more lurid, but not that much more. I mean, actually back in those days that was what foreign films had. They had sex, they were selling Laura Antonelli.

Yes, you can have art films about the triumph of the human spirit and all of that, but you'll have it done with a big-budget icon with a $20 million salary. You'll have Julia Roberts, you'll have Robert Redford, you'll have Russell Crowe doing those films, because if they're going to cost $90 million, they're going to make that movie for a public that's very large and mainstream. They're not going to make it for three or four million black people.

For me, those little cinemas in Paris where I saw many art films for the first time meant that cinema became a kind of pilgrimage site.

I'll watch anything, from action to art films.

If 'formulaic' is somebody who is unlikely to succeed starting down a process and succeeding - then isn't that what most films are about? And art films are about people who aren't likely to succeed and then don't succeed.

I think a smart person today realizes that you have to be part of the art films that are done just for the sake of the art.

Tokyo is wonderful for distribution of international films, a lot of Iranian films, Taiwanese films. But most of the art films are from Europe and Asia.

I think bad movies are made around the world, not just in Hollywood. There are as many bad art films in the whole world as there are bad commercial films.

The Malayalam audience knows me as an art film actress, and I am fine with that because I know that such films come from the heart. It's difficult to do them, but the satisfaction you get is immense.

As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making.

Art films aren't necessarily photography. It's feeling. If we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we made a good picture.

In the early '90s, when those little art films started coming out, we were introduced to Quentin Tarantino and guys like that, and independent cinema was something that everyone wanted to be a part of.

I loved the idea of the fact that the way, like I said, they colored outside of the lines. You know, there was rules that they didn't have to follow. And you got -you got - you could get more of a sensational thrill, all right, with some of these exploitation movies or art films, or you could get something you wouldn't see at the normal cineplex.

They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.

In the '90s, I kind of put aside all those things I loved in the '80s and I got really into watching foreign films and art films and stuff like that, and sort of soaking those up.

Independent film is almost nonexistent right now, because all the distributers that used to love to put out these little art films are all out of business right now, because it costs so much to open a movie.

I was a complete anomaly in this business. I didn't fit into the Hema Malini-Zeenat Aman commercial cinema mould, neither the Shabana Azmi-Smita Patil art cinema mould.

I always try to do middle-of-the-road cinema.

I've stopped going to see art films because every critic gives them four stars and say things like 'masterpiece,' 'spellbinding' and 'mesmerizing.' I mean, they're doing that with my film, but I don't want to use those blurbs. Critical reviews aren't worth too much anymore because just about every film can get one or two of them.