Cinematic Manipulation Quotes

When I'm writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that's completely self-serving. With film, it's like, the camera can't really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent.

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

I was fascinated by the effects that could be achieved by editing. The cutting room became a magic workshop for me.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of my movies, brings a whole set of unique experiences. Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time.

I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.

Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.

Of course there's conscious manipulation! Everything about a movie is manipulation ... If you like it, it's an interpretation. If you don't like it, it's a lie - but everything about these movies is a distortion."

That's one of the things about theater vs. film - with theater, actors have a little more control, and one of the disappointing things about films is that once you're done shooting, anything can happen, you know?

It's great the way the old-time directors used to manipulate the hell out of you. You see someone dying and all of a sudden a ghost would come out and they go walking hand in hand up the stairway.

Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.

I like films that just put you in someone's world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you'd care about them.

I can tell when an actor's forcing tears, and it's tricky because you then have to film it and edit in a certain way to skirt around the issue.