Cinematic Expression Quotes

I'm not a huge big fan of music video.

I like movies made by Spike Lee - doing those films out of the U.S., that is really daring.

There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.

Sometimes you're watching a great film actor, and if you stand 10 feet away from them, you're like, 'God, they're terrible. They're not doing anything.' And then you see the close-up, and it's so nuanced, and so much expression is happening. They were acting for that camera and for no one else.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

Cinema’s characteristic forte is its ability to capture and communicate the intimacies of the human mind.

Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.

Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second.

Directing music videos is all about capturing images.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It's like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high - you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.

To me, movies are valuable as an art form and as a wonderful means of popular entertainment. But I think movies have gone terribly wrong.

I think I've always been drawn to the notion of talk as cinematic.

Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.

I don't want to do a history lesson. I don't think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.

I loved 'La La Land.' I would love to do a film like 'La La Land' which has so much simplicity and joy of cinema in it.

When I did 'Don't Look Back,' I no longer had Time-Life looking over my shoulder, so I could kind of do it as I wanted, and it was like I was really correcting 'Jane.'

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

In TV, when you come in to direct an episode, you are effectively learning an established language; you then have to try to learn to speak it really well. But on a movie, you are the guy. You are creating the language; you make most of the decisions.

Film becomes a living organism. After awhile, it begins to tell you what it needs, and you're usually best listening.

I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.

I want to be the person who eventually doesn't have to be in front of the camera. I can be behind the camera and really change things cinematically, and this is giving me an opportunity to do something behind the camera, which I really want to maximize.

I think that cinema is medium of communication. It's as valid as novels or fine art.