Cinematic Magic Quotes

'Miracle at St. Anna.' I was challenged by Spike Lee. When he offered me the film, he looked me square in the eye and said, 'You start this film off and you end this film. I don't want a dry eye in the theatre. Can you pull that off?' He was dead serious.

Working with Terry Gilliam was magic - I've been watching his films since I was little.

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 don't know, I always had an active dream life, and there's something so profound and wonderful about a movie. It's so alive. It's so shared. The thing of sitting in an audience and going into a dream-like state with several hundred other people that are sharing exactly what you're feeling is a profound event.

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 a huge fan of Richard Curtis - there's real grief, real compassion in his films as well as cheekiness; it's a wonderful cocktail.

We go to movies to be taken away to another place, to be dazzled, to dream, to hopefully be filled with wonder. The design of the world and the look of the film is all in service of trying to create that feeling of wonder in the audience.

I feel like people want to be surprised when they get out of the movies. They want something thrown at them they didn't expect. They want stuff that reminds them of the feelings that you get when you're watching art house movies but with the fun of like a big summer movie. That's the goal, I guess.

But considering that I walked in expecting no complexity at all, let alone the visual wonderments, 'Snow White and the Huntsman' is a considerable experience.

As a little girl, I didn't dream of being a ballet dancer; I dreamt of being a movie star like Ginger Rogers and dancing with Fred Astaire. I used to watch the Sunday double-bills on TV and Iong to be part of what seemed a perfect Disneyland world. Astaire was a genius.

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

When you see 'Lord of the Rings,' you want to feel like you've been dropped into it and that you're part of it. You don't want to be aware of how it's being done; you just want it to feel really seamless.

We all know that one can never recreate the magic of an original film.

I loved old black and white movies, especially the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. I loved everything about them - the songs, the music, the romance and the spectacle. They were real class and I knew that I wanted to be in that world.

I like celluloid, I like film, I like the way that when a movie is projected it sort of breathes a little in the gate. That's the magic of it to me.

I feel blessed and lucky that some of the film industry's most magical and iconic songs where legendary composers and singers have collaborated have been filmed on me.

The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That's the thrill of it, the miracle - that's what holds us to movies forever. It's what we wish we could do in real life.

'Jurassic Park' was able to get away with big, dynamic filmmaking that might be out of place in another kind of story.

Giving people the opportunity to sit in a dark theater together and have emotions in public, whether they're laughing or crying - that's what makes me happy.

That's the imagination that happens in the theater. That imagination is translated in film by the film magicians and all the technology.

No film has captivated my imagination more than 'King Kong.' I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old.

The Pixar people continuously amaze me. They come up with something that actually looks as though it takes place in this happy, real-world. Every plot line is not just plausible, but oddly authentic. The stories are full of adventure, humor and love. The characters are written with great human dimension. I don't know how they do it but they astound me.

Watching Sridevi emote was an experience. She was very quiet on the sets. But once in front of the camera, all her energy would be unleashed.

I've been in love with the cinema since childhood and it's a fantasy of mine to appear in a Hollywood movie.

Manmohan Desai's films pack a lot of joy and have a child-like quality and you can see the director is having fun, but my movies don't suspend disbelief that much. But it's good to be compared to Manmohan Desai. He was run down by critics in his time.