Film Limitations Quotes

My theory in the '90s was that I didn't want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee 'Sense and Sensibility' was beautiful, but other ones, I didn't think justice was being done. It's not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

You can't train a goat. You can't. You can't. So I don't recommend making a movie with a goat in a major role to anyone.

No actor can rise above the script of the film.

No movie can claim to be a work of philosophy. They fulfill a totally different need in people.

Film actors reach a certain level, but they don't get beyond it unless they work in the theater.

I've really grown to love film, but I think occasionally you need to get up on a stage and see what's going on.

It's so hard to shoot wealth. It doesn't show up on film.

I would love to shoot on film, but you can't really shoot a lot of footage on film, and you can't print a lot of it.

And, for any performer, to be able to go deep into character is fantastic. In film you only get to do that if you're the leading character. But in television you get 18 hours to really test the audience and take them to the edge of how far they will go with this character. I can step over this line and I love that.

Stop-motion has limitations, any form of filmmaking does, but stop-motion has a lot of limitations.

I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.

Film is limitless, but some stage presentations on film can look too theatrical.

Stage acting is for me the basic form of acting. If you make films all the time, you have so few possibilities to rehearse. And it's important to rehearse, because it gives you the possibility to try things which are not good!

The wonderful thing about writing for theatre is you can go anywhere you want with the language. There are no limits. With film, they frown on language - it's always 'Too many words.'

Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.

We shot 'Party Girl' on film, and I remember being told, 'We need to get this in two takes because we don't have a lot of film in the mag right now!'

There's something mystical and wonderful about being in the room with the actual live performer s on stage that works. In film, it doesn't work so you're dependent on a great director to keep the thing moving along.

You have to contort your body in a certain way to hit a low note. When you're on film, you can't. So you do, in a sense, get to hide behind your voice, which is nice.

All great scripts need not reach silver screen, and every good story can't be narrated in a 2-hour film.

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

I think the roles in television are better for women right now. At this point, I don't want to continue doing the same things I've been doing in film because it's very limited.

With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity - voiceover, the camera's point of view, good acting - but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.

I'm really glad to have made a movie that way on Superbad, because I learned a lot about what can be done and what the limitations are.

People gave us everything for free. We were allowed only so much film per picture, but there was no limit to the creativity. I like to say that they let us loose like wild dogs in the streets of Paris.

With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.