Cinematic Illusion Quotes

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

I think it's obvious when you're watching a movie, and there's people fighting or someone's slipping on the side of the building, that it's fake and it really removes you from it.

Everyone knows that a movie is false. But if as filmmakers we give the audience too many reasons to lose the suspension of disbelief, I believe we're working our way down a hole.

I've said this so many times but there's a magic when you have a really good actor in a really good makeup.

I'm not emotionally excited by the power of cinema's tricks anymore.

My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person. People are only glamorous if you don't see them. Like the movies used to make people years ago. There is something about people on screen that makes them so special; when you see them in person, they are so different and the whole illusion is gone.

Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

On movies, you have a lot of stylists that get things too pretty. Everything gets steamed and ironed. It's just not the way we really behave.

I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.

Good cinema is what we can believe, and bad cinema is what we can't believe.

Isn't Hollywood - and I love movies - a lot of it about a big lie?

Hindi films are so deceptive. I thought Mumbai was this big, grand, beautiful city with sea-facing flats.

Movies are magical. It transcends a lot of hate or human faults in real life because of the fantasy of it all.

The secret to film is that it's an illusion.

The film depends on the audience's belief in this relationship.

If you want to believe in the fantasy on screen, then you have to believe in the characters and use them as a stepping-stone to lead you into this fantasy world.

There's a fashion for a macho style of filmmaking. How long can your longest take be? And shooting things in one shot. For me, if you can sort of disappear and make people feel that they are there, that involves massive amounts of work.

There is nothing real about film. Nothing. Even the light particles that project the film can't be proven to exist. Nothing is there.

I don't like horror, which is ridiculous because I've been in three horror movies, but when I see those things, I see camera tricks and fake blood and actors screaming and I don't know understand why other actors don't see that.

You never saw Peter Sellers the actor trying to make you laugh. All he was doing was the character. What I'm saying is that I don't think you should know you're in a movie. I don't like it when actors are winking at the audience and saying, 'Right, isn't this funny? Are you with me?'

I love that feeling you get once you leave a cinema having just watched a movie during the day. Your eyes slowly adjust to the natural light, and your mind, being a little slower, takes its time to separate the images of film from the reality you are suddenly facing.

I don't think there's a back lot here in Hollywood anymore that has those streets, like a French Quarter.

I watched a lot of avant-garde films, like Maya Deren's work, and I love film's technical ability to do things that are impossible in real life. It's related to the way collage allows you to manipulate reality and the hierarchies that are inherent in our awful but amazing world.

I did 'Vice' with Christian Bale and 'Foxcatcher' with Steve Carell - both of those films had significant prosthetic work. You do need to be cognizant of the fact that the material that you're photographing is not skin.

Film is a window to the real world but a lie that makes you believe the unbelievable.