Cinematic Escapism Quotes

[I]nstead of the usual "Why can't we make movies more like real life?" I think a more pertinent question is "Why can't real life be more like the movies?"

My relationship with 'Star Wars' is that I'm old enough that I saw it when it first came out - 'A New Hope,' that is - and it was like when Dorothy steps out of black and white into Technicolor. I was transported from a gray, miserable 1970s London into a different galaxy, and I didn't know what it was, but I wanted to be a part of it.

I can remember watching 'Lord of the Rings' and being truly regretful that I wasn't a being in that world.

I can't help moving my face - reacting - when I watch a movie, because I'm really inhabiting a character. I know this is weird, but it demonstrates what I love about cinema: it allows you to live a different life, to have a different experience, to disappear for two hours. I think it's wonderful.

These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.

These so called Popcorn movies, or family movies, actually provide something quite beautiful and something quite necessary, which is a family bonding experience.

Cinema is a technologically mediated dreamspace, a way to access, a portal to the numinous that unfolded in the fourth dimension, so cinema became sort of a waking dream where we can travel in space and time, where we can travel in mind. This became more than virtual reality, this became a real virtuality.

Whenever I see a new film, I deliberately tune down several 'dials' in my mind - critical faculties associated with logic, plotting, science - just so I can retain some ability to enjoy a flick in the spirit it's offered.

I'm curious and you know, I really think cinema is strong medium that allows you to go to so many different mental countries, not just geographical countries. As far as it allows me to express something of my own truth, it's fine for me. I can go to the moon.

I think horror films in the past maybe touched on social themes having to do with whatever era in which they were made, but in the end, it's definitely an escapist form of entertainment.

How long will we keep making films where hero-heroine is dancing around trees?

The power of movies lies in the fact that it enables the viewer to enter the reality, to some extent, of the characters.

You just can't enjoy any of the movie when you're in it.

Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are... In this country, people die at 21. They die emotionally at 21, maybe younger... My responsibility as an artist is to help people get past 21... The films are a roadmap through emotional and intellectual terrain that provides a solution on how to save pain.

I like Hindi movies. Although my wife thinks the hero and heroine breaking into a song and dance every five minutes is ridiculous, but I find them entertaining.

I'd skip school regularly to see movies - even in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early.

We don't make glamorous movies today. Everything now is very realistic, artistic - and depressing. When is the last time you you saw a wonderful musical or a fabulous fantasy?

For a while in the twenties and thirties, art was talked about as a substitute for religion; now B movies are a substitute for religion.

I think people go to the movies to be entertained, to have an experience, to disappear from their own reality for a couple of hours. If the film truly succeeds in everything the filmmaker sets out for it to be, then it's elevated to art. It's elevated to something special, because it gives people a visceral feeling of something they're experiencing as a collective group. You feel something and that's what turns it into what you may call art.

I totally agree. I hate knowing too much when I'm going to the cinema and watching as a viewer. I don't want to know that the actor has just gone through a divorce. I don't want to know that the person is an alcoholic. It just gets in the way of my pleasure of watching the character on the screen.