Film Archives Quotes

I am a fan of movies and there is something about watching film that is burned into celluloid for all time that is now a piece of history. You go watch, being a fan of classic films and my children and their children are going to be watching these movies.

Kids talk to me and say they want to do musicals again because they've studied the tapes of the old films. We didn't have that. We thought once we had made it, even on film, it was gone except for the archives.

They do put my films on TV from time to time. I don't go out of my way to watch them. But I'm now made to tape them for my daughter so that when she's old enough she can say, 'Hey, that's Daddy.'

The only other human endeavor on which there's more 16-millimeter film than pro football is World War II, and we're going to pass that in 2013.

I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

On 'Senna,' it got to the point where there was so much footage that our first editor had the wild suggestion that we only use the archive.

1925's 'The Lost World' is... really, everything a dinosaur movie should be. Like a dinosaur, this classic was once extinct too, existing as mere fragmentary footage and stills, but cinemaphile fossil-hunters have painstakingly excavated bits and pieces from obscure archives and assembled them into a nearly-complete animal.

I recently found out that the print of my first film 'Utrada Rathri,' released in 1978, is damaged beyond repair. So the only way to relive earlier films is through books based on the screenplay.

Actually, the only thing I regret is not making more underground films and bringing them with me as historical documents.

I decided to restore 'Napoleon' after a widescreen festival at the Odeon Leicester Square in 1968. It was run by Richard Arnell and George Dunning, who animated and directed 'Yellow Submarine,' and they'd got their hands on the last scene, the triptychs. They just showed that part, without music and with the projectors misaligned.

But you know, as you say, the original versions of my films are getting out there, slowly.

I hope films will be somehow preserved and seen by as many people as possible in the future. There are endless treasures for audiences to discover, if only we can keep them from disappearing.