Film Up Quotes

“Grandmother has pictures in her head, too, but her pictures are all confused, like someone has muddled the film up and she can't tell what happened in what order, so she thinks that dead people are still alive and she doesn't know whether something happened in real life or whether it happened on television.”

— Mark Haddon

“This one, even though it called for San Francisco, I think they wanted to initially shoot part of the film up here, you know get the exteriors and then go back to L.A. We really fought to get it up here and I think Paramount was really pleased.”

— Philip Kaufman

“When you're younger, and you do your first or second film, you want to show everyone what you can do.”

— Philippe Falardeau

“Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors' backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.”

— Adam Rapp

“Film is a much lonelier process than theatre. You really don't have any rehearsal time in film. You don't shape it together ... with theatre, there is a complete kind of family atmosphere. The sociable side of this business is the theatrical side, it really isn't the film side.”

— Keira Knightley

“Our film examines the heroism, courage and prowess of the Soviet submarine force in ways never seen before.”

— Kathryn Bigelow

“If you film a scene in a wide shot, especially a disturbing, distressing moment, I do feel like that helps you feel as though you're the room with these people, instead of cutting it up and getting close - which you wouldn't be doing if you were actually in a room with these people.”

— Alex Karpovsky

“I avoided nudity unless a film couldn't be told without those scenes. If you look at my films, few of them have that element, yet nudity and male fantasies have become emblematic of my work.”

— Greta Scacchi

“Casting a film, you can have the greatest actors in a film and it doesn't work. It's a combination of all of the elements.”

— Stellan Skarsgard

“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.”

— Sandra Oh

“When I attack a role, be it TV, film or stage, the first thing I say is, I don't want to know anything. If it's good I don't want to hear it; if it's bad I don't want to hear it. The only thing either thing can do is distract me. I like to stay focused.”

— Cicely Tyson

“Way back when the Sam Peckinpah film The Wild Bunch premiered, a woman journalist raised her hand at the press conference and asked the following: "Why in the world do you have to show so much blood all over the place?" She was pretty worked up about it. One of the actors, Ernest Borgnine, looked a bit perplexed and fielded the question. "Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?" This film came out at the height of the Vietnam War.
I love that line. That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way. And bleeding. Shooting and bleeding.”

— Haruki Murakami

“In an action film you act in the action. If it's a dramatic film you act in the drama.”

— Jean-Claude Van Damme

“That could also be because at one point during the film, our hands found each other. And when I felt Michael's middle finger caress the inside of my palm, it sent a tickle up my spine, and the fingers of my right hand were soon exploring his left hand, and we each took turns tracing the contours of the other's hands.”

— Zack Love

“My happiness is being able to present my talents for people to see, and I feel like I'm an ambassador of Thai history and Thai culture on film so that people can see Muay Thai.”

— Tony Jaa

“On the film sets of 'New Moon' and 'Eclipse,' I feel safe. It's like you're in the center of the hurricane, but outside is where it starts to get chaotic.”

— Chaske Spencer

“Contrary to what many writers imply about the process, nobody forces a writer to sell his work to the film industry.”

— Thomas Perry

“Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.”

— Julie Taymor

“I internalize everything, keep everything inside. I'm not used to spilling my guts, and when you have to do that on film to make a point, it's hard. It's rough. I don't think it's as easy as people think.”

— Dave Bautista

“A movie shoots six months for two hours of film.”

— Margot Robbie

“Sometimes I work on film sets. I've done this for 40 years. I always wanted to photograph on the set of an Ingmar Bergman film. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity.”

— Mary Ellen Mark

“I started off writing TV adverts. I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film.”

— Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

“It's rare for the studios to find a filmmaker who wants to make a family film. To find someone that has an idea, embraces it, has kids and wants to make something exciting - well, they don't see that too often.”

— Robert Rodriguez

“When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse in New York with martini glasses.”

— Tom Ford

“Many people are walking along the shore, turning poetic springtime faces towards the sea; they're having a holiday because of the sun. [ ... ] The true sea is cold and black, full of animals; it crawls under this thin green film made to deceive human beings.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies ... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough.”

— Andrew O'Hagan

“I loved making The Imitation Game and it's really gratifying to hear the audience's response to the character that I play. It was just a little thing that I did because I really liked the film and I liked Benedict [Cumberbatch] and I loved Morten's [director Morten Tyldum] previous film, Headhunters. For me, it was something I did thinking, "Wow, this is a lovely quality piece of work."”

— Mark Strong

“That's what a powerful story does. It creates a more intense experience of life for you to watch. That's what a good film does for me, anyway. That process, I enjoy. It just makes for entertaining characters and entertaining films.”

— Sharlto Copley

“A saucer flew right over (us), put down three landing gears, and landed out on the dry lakebed. (The cameramen) went out there with their cameras toward the UFO ... I had chance to hold (the film) up to the window. Good close-up shots. There was no doubt in my mind that it was made someplace other than on this earth.”

— Gordon Cooper

“I know a lot of directors have a whole staff of people trying to find their next film for them. I always just end up writing mine.”

— Brian Helgeland

“I'm not very good at sounding like other people. When you're going through your 20's and trying to get a break and that kind of thing, and you're trying to do something that sounds like film music, your idea of what it would be, it never really worked out for me and it's only really when I learned to trust the fact that I could only really sound like me.”

— Steven Price

“The only thing that I can do is hold a mirror in front of men and women, in front of the viewer in the theater, to reflect. There is nothing but reflection that I could intend to offer the viewer of the film.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

“Every writer has to make an emotional journey from artist sitting in attic to being part of a business. The writer of a film is like Tinkerbell. You are only there because people believe in you. The moment they dont, because youre a pain the arse, youve lost.”

— Julian Fellowes