Top 494 Film Quotes

All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it’s a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

I did Broadway shows. And I started realizing that this is actually how I’m going to make my living. So maybe I should try to do television and film and make a better living and get an occasional residual check so I can pay a mortgage someday.

If we didn’t want to upset anyone, we would make films about sewing, but even that could be dangerous. But I think finally, in a film, it is how the balance is and the feelings are. But I think there has to be those contrasts and strong things within a film for the total experience.

‘Pride’ is my first film with a happy ending. Before, I naively thought they were a cop-out, but now I’ve come to believe that happy endings and wish fulfilment are an incredibly important part of our cultural life.

You know, the reward for ‘Captain America’ is amazing. It’s always fun to see a giant spectacle film and see the fun stuff – the special effects.

Rain is also very difficult to film, particularly in Ireland because it’s quite fine, so fine that the Irish don’t even acknowledge that it exists.

I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.

People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film.

Horror film fans are pretty starved for quality. If you do something thoughtful or if you make something good, they’re so thankful for it.

A film engages you emotionally and intellectually.

I use my film-making to work through my deep questions and my deep problems. I think I could watch each film and tell you exactly which part of my psyche I’m trying to work out.

Show me a Scorsese film, and I’ll show you a movie where he’s taken risks. It’s just his nature. He’s an artist, and artists take risks. He always does what he believes in.

I think we’ve told a lot of lies about human behavior through film.

I believe in three-act structure. When I say that to novel people, or people in the world of books, they go, ‘Well, that’s a film thing.’ However, even a good joke has three acts.

With ‘Daud,’ basically, I wanted to make a very ‘Mad Max‘ kind of a film: that was my original intention.

In some ways, the audience becomes complacent when they go to a horror film. And so it’s fun to take that attitude and then to upend it.

A director is a very selfish person. For him, his film is like his baby.

Theatre is an actor’s medium. An actor has little control over a film. Which is why most actors who have done theatre, and then come to films find the former more creatively satisfying.

My whole goal was to be able to work in television and film and maintain a normal life, never be in a tabloid.

There’s a great deal of mystery in film editing, and that’s because you’re not supposed to see a lot of it. You’re supposed to feel that a film has pace and rhythm and drama, but you’re not necessarily supposed to be worried about how that was accomplished.

I don’t like doing things without understanding the meaning. Once I walked out of a film event as I could not stand the insult they meted out to a Sanskrit verse.

If I bring anything to the Coen Brothers’ films, it’s my ability to change tack and create a different mood from film to film.

There’s something about an American soldier you can’t explain. They’re so grateful for anything, even a film actress coming to see them.

I’m proud of Lord of the Rings. I think it’s a once in a lifetime role, and a once in a lifetime film. It was made with so much care and passion and meticulous detail and everybody was so behind it.

I’m not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity.

‘She’s Gotta Have It’ and ‘School Daze,’ I really didn’t know what I was doing. And the biggest indicator of that was the acting. ‘Do the Right Thing‘ was like the first film where I really felt comfortable working with actors.

I usually surface on social media only when there’s a film.

Our short film ‘Bareilly Ki Beti’ is inspired from the incident which occurred in Bareilly, where a couple while digging a grave for their stillborn found a live baby girl buried two to three feet down. She was rushed to the hospital and she survived.

Los Angeles is much like Mumbai, the film industry rules the city over most other professions, so it feels like home.

When you’re writing a screenplay, it’s like you’re dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it.

I’d like to do a cowboy film. I suppose I’ve come close to it on occasion, but not really to a classic cowboy film.

The escape to an unchallenging fairy tale can be very nice and I’m all for that, but film can also challenge you to confront the realities of our world.

On a film set, where there is so much chaos, I find inner peace.

Being on a film set, you are always around such fantastic people. And I feel like I’ve been lucky. I feel like I’ve worked with the best of the best.

I think it’s really difficult to justify converting a film that wasn’t shot in 3-D into 3-D. I really do believe, as does James Cameron and all the people who are actually pro-3-D, that you have to go out and shoot it that way. You have nothing but compromise if you don’t.

So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It’s still their ball game. It’s their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director’s impulses.

‘Hum Dono’ was accepted in a very big way. It was the official entry at the 1962 Berlin Film Festival.

My biggest dream from the beginning – besides Evanescence – is scoring film and writing music for film.

It’s rare to have even half-meaningful conversations in the film industry.

I’ve never made a film that I didn’t believe in, you know? However the picture turns out, I’ve always given everything to it. That’s kind of how I approach life. I can’t help it. There’s no part-way with me on anything in any area of my life.

When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.

When kids like Steven Spielberg were eight and nine and 10, they had little cameras, and that’s all they wanted to do. When I was 10, I was in my attic pretending to host my own variety show. Spielberg wasn’t. That’s why he’s a film director, and I’m doing what I’m doing.

If you’re sitting in the audience, you probably can’t see the preparation and work that goes into creating a great scene or a great part, but I can assure you that a good film depends on lot of different things falling perfectly into place.

I’ve never figured out who ‘Heath Ledger’ is on film: ‘This is what you expect when you hire me, and it will be recognizable.’

For me, actors have to have a character, an aura, body language. They’re not models. They used to call actors models. But I want them to participate in the film.

Sometimes you don’t want to get married too much to a lot of rehearsing, I feel, when it comes to film, because there’s so many technicalities. So if I’m in my head, I’ve gotten settled on something, I’m gonna have to change it if I get there and something was set that’s completely different.

The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one; that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being.

I love the Cannes Film Festival. From the lavish parties and events to the red carpet attire, this star-studded week-long event is where I get a lot of inspiration for hair and fashion.

I did a little film called ‘Nina,’ a small role. I played a French girl who was a nurse to Nina Simone. Zoe Saldana plays Nina.

I think the record industry, by and large what’s left of it, is still totally homophobic. I think it’s much less so in the film industry now, but the record industry, it’s always been a man’s world.

In the Indian film industry, especially those of us who are in mainstream cinema, we invariably play a typical hero’s role. More often than not, we cater to the public perception. However, there is a latent desire in most actors to do a role where you can go all out and experiment.

They’re all based on factual characters. Well, a good amount of them. That’s why I was attracted to this genre anyways, because these characters are so large and cartoonish, they’re like caricatures, I just felt that there had to be a film made about them.

‘The Custodian‘ was my first film, and there were so many lessons to learn in that week. It was really fun, but for me, I look at it as a training film, and I’m not really proud of my work in it.

Colombia is so different to what I know, and every aspect of the country is different to England, and I loved it. I loved the culture and the food, and the coffee was amazing. The place that we were was stunning, and it really was quite an amazing experience to film out there.

So, where’s the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?

If you make an authentic political film, which talks of real people and real events, in a politically conscious country like India, it is but natural that people will react to it in different ways and there will be a collage of opinions.

There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you’ve got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I’m sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn’t have the same substance.

On Saturday afternoons, there was a film, of course, and then we did about four shows between the films. And I would do a tap dance, a little military tap.

I think each film should be regarded as its own specific text.

Football is a chess game to me. If you move your pawn against my bishop, I’ll counter that move to beat you. Football is the same way. I study so much film that I know exactly what teams are going to do. I love knowing what a offense is going to run and stuffing that play.

Well, I think every film student goes into film school thinking they want to write and direct their own movies, and they don’t realize how much goes into it, and what a process it is.

It might kill you to say it, because the film really takes on the Catholic Church, but I do think there is a sort of affection for certain rituals, and an authenticity to the presentation of those rituals, in ‘Mea Maxima Culpa.’

I’ve never done work for money ever. If your choices are based on grosses and the film doesn’t do well, what does that mean? It leaves you with nothing.

I never liked the idea of the ‘Royal Family‘ film. I always thought it was a rotten idea.

I view every film as a commitment to undertake a long journey.

The thing I do miss about the way some sequels were in the past was that each film felt like its own unique, complete tone. Now, sequels are tonal facsimiles of the ones before them, like a television series, whereas back in the past sequels would often be radically different from the ones before.

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

‘Deep Red’ (1975) is my favorite movie. The character David Hemmings plays is very much based on my own personality. It was a very strong film, very brutal, and of course the censors were upset. It was cut by almost an hour in some countries.

I feel I can rush the passer well. I feel like I can play the run even better than what I did starting off to when I got in my senior year as far as making plays in the backfield and just being able to break down film a lot better.

One of the best teaching experiences Ed Schein and I had when we were teaching at MIT in the 1960s was inventing a course on leadership through film.

I am just pitifully nostalgic. I can’t help but roll my eyes at myself frequently. I mean, I still shoot black-and-white film. And I am constantly reminiscing about the ‘good old days.’ I’m 28 years old. There haven’t even been that many ‘good old days.’ But still, I love to look back.

I did some glamorous roles and even wore a bikini in the Telugu film ‘Drona,’ but the audience was aghast. Some said, ‘Please don’t ever wear a bikini again!’

You can’t make anything without making mistakes, do you know what I mean? Robert De Niro’s in the ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle’ film. There’s a lot of far greater people than me who have made mistakes in their careers… There’s loads of people who have made stuff that isn’t good and never get asked about it.

Every film is a comeback, no matter what I did the last time.

There was an interesting article in Los Angeles Magazine about women directors. A woman director makes one bad independent film and her career is over. Guys tend to get an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

As a fan, when I hear that a film is going to be turned into a television show, I do go to that place immediately of, ‘Is it going to be any good? Is it going to be a waste of time? Why are they doing it?’ It’s ’12 Monkeys,’ and ’12 Monkeys’ is awesome, so I wanted to be a part of it and work on it.

I saw ‘Joy Luck Club‘ when it came out, so that was early mid-’90s, and I remember seeing it with my long-time collaborator, Mina Shum. We’d just done ‘Double Happiness,’ and we saw this movie, and we were weeping. Like, shuddering weeping. Weeping more than really the film deserved.

They make three types of movies, and if you don’t make one of those three, you have to find independent financing: It’s either big-action superhero tent-pole thing, or it’s an animated film, or it’s an R-rated, raunchy sex comedy. They don’t make movies about real people.

I’m not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I’ve done have been a small part of my work. What I’ve sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.

For my very first movie, ‘Roger and Me,’ I made it as part of my deal with Warner Brothers that the four people that were evicted in that film, that Warner Brothers would house – would pay their mortgage or their rent for the next two years to give them a chance to get on their feet.

More meaningful cinema is being made, and that is the reason why you see a rejuvenated Malayalam film industry. But more films aimed at youth are needed.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn’t seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

I really liked doing a number of the projects and directors, and etc., etc., I knew about half-way through that I would never be doing that again. It’s just not me. I really am happy as a part-time film composer, not a full-time film composer.

Loveleen Tandon, the casting director of ‘Brick Lane,’ understood my capacity and suggested my name to director Sarah Gavron. The film has such universal appeal that given a chance I would like to remake it in Hindi.

With ‘Nobody Knows,’ I consciously set out to make a fiction film, which is a different approach from ‘Distance,’ but I still applied a lot of the things I learned from making ‘Distance’: for example, how to use the camera in relation to the children and how to create the right atmosphere on set.

In ‘Age of Innocence,’ the opening flowers, that’s a metaphor for the film, the Victorian veneer with the malevolence beneath it. We attempted to show that with flowers that start as sweet and then slowly become malevolent.

My childhood dream was always to be on Broadway. I wanted to end up in TV and film. It’s kind of flipped, and I’m not mad about it, but my childhood dream is Broadway and I want to end up there.

If the money’s right, I’ll do a film.

Pain is temporary, film is forever.

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.

Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there’s more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you’re bankrupt.

In Tim’s films, more than most, if you miss the tone, you don’t get the film.

I wouldn’t make an anti-American film. I’m one of the most pro-American foreigners I know. I love America and Americans.

I didn’t dream about being a director. I didn’t know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

‘Selma’ is a story about voice – the voice of a great leader; the voice of a community that triumphs despite turmoil; and the voice of a nation striving to grow into a better society. I hope the film reminds us that all voices are valuable and worthy of being heard.

I worked in a software company in Bangalore and made short films during weekends. I learnt the basics during a one-day workshop called Film Camp Sanjay Nambiar.

You have to find it in the moment, and that’s one of the challenges of being an actor – especially a film actor – is that you have to maintain these heightened emotions for long periods of time. There’s no trick to it. You just have to do.

Film is better than digital in every way. It has better contrast ratio, better blacks, and better color reproduction. It’s a more organic image, which is more the way your eyes see.

When you’re making a film, you have to make most of your decisions on the run, and there is a tendency to always shoot from the hip.

I got to work with Dustin Hoffman on a film called ‘Billy Bathgate.’ I got to work with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn and Bob Zemeckis on ‘Death Becomes Her.’ There are still a few actors out there that I would like to work with.

When you’re doing a single-camera show, it’s more buying into a level of reality. I think a sitcom, a four-camera show, doesn’t require that so much. I think with a film show, you just need the characters to grow.

I started learning filmmaking by joining a weekend film school in Bengaluru. I made some amateur short films that got appreciation from people around me.

Audiences don’t come to theatres going by reviews. Even if a film is rated low, the collections won’t get affected.

It’s interesting because, even with ‘Beetlejuice,’ I was an awkward kid. I started at puberty and went through it on film. Lydia was one of my favorite roles because I related to her a lot.

A film – especially when it’s a personal film – is going to hit somebody or it’s not. There’s nothing you can do about it.

I’ve been working since I was 9, and I’ve never known a life without a film set.

I have a nationally distributed film whose pivotal scene is the ultrasound-guided abortion.

Before the Beatles, America was musically a very conservative country. You can see film footage of people at a baseball game, they all had hats and ties on, and the women were dressed up like they were going to church. That was the America that I started getting interested in musically.

Rajkumar was the winner of ‘Naalaya Iyakkunar Season 2,’ and I was impressed with his short film. He joined me as an assistant when I started the pre-production work for ‘Vada Chennai.’

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

What you write sets the visual style for the film. But you have to compromise your style in your first few films before people let you do what you want to do.

I think India is very passionate about films. It’s almost a second religion back home. Due to that, I think film stars are – are really held in great esteem. Not that we’re complaining, but I think with that comes a lot of responsibility.

‘American Honey‘ takes you into the feelings of a girl travelling through the United States while giddily in love. You see modern America through her intense feelings. But again and again the film pulls the rug out from under your feet – scenes never play out as you expect.

I bristle a little when the argument for film gets put into the nostalgia ghetto. Film is still the highest quality and best-looking image capture medium available. I don’t think it always will be. The digital image will get better, and it will eventually surpass the quality of the film image, but it isn’t there yet.

I guess what I enjoy most is directing, because it incorporates all aspects of filmmaking. Directing is in the same line as acting – both are popularity contests, and in both you’re trying to tell a story through the film as a medium.

‘Masoom’ was like a picnic for all of us. We kids just wanted to have fun acting in the film. We never realised when the film was completed. When we did, we realised the party was over.

I would love to do anything from a really gritty, interesting, indie type film, to that commercial, bigger stuff.

Choosing location is integral to the film: in essence, another character.

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

I’m willing to look my own nightmare on film, but if it endangers my life, then I’m willing to put my life before movies.

The secret is not to make a film that causes something like Virginia Tech to happen. The secret is to make a film that stops it happening.

How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I’m portraying in the film or play.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

I did a film called ‘Fort McCoy,’ based on a true story of one of the few internment camps during WWII that was actually in the United States.

‘Gandhi‘ was a well-made film but surely not my best. It had flaws, which I understand two-and-a-half decades after I directed it. I will never call it a propaganda film for the Indian Congress, but it could have been made better had I concentrated on certain minute details.

I am an emotional and fragile person. I observe life, I am perceptive and can read a person’s body language. I have a strong journalistic streak in me, and had I not been a filmmaker, I would have become a film journalist. I have combined my perceptive and journalistic traits to create my own brand of cinema.

As a producer, the most important call you can get is on Saturday morning, when the Friday-night grosses come in. As a director, you want your film to be successful. But your outlook is a bit different. You become very conscious of the reviews.

We had nothing in hand and my father used to live on the street. The profession of acting happened to him when B.R. Chopra picked him up for a film, and my father acted just to earn money for survival.

If you get a chance to be in a film, that’s great. One of my goals is to make a record as good as Don Henley’s album, Building the Perfect Beast.

I think being attracted to mistakes is one of the things that film can capture in a way that theater can’t. Film can capture a moment of spontaneous life that will never be captured again.

I felt ‘Gone with the Wind’ would last five years, and it’s lasted over 70 and into a new millennium. There is a special place in my heart for that film and Melanie. She was a remarkable character – a loving person – and because of that, she was a happy person. And Scarlett, of course, was not.

I want film stories to provoke a question in people about what’s going on emotionally around them and empower them in some way or ask them about themselves.

The 20-year goal is to be a film director. The 15-year goal is to win an Oscar. The five-year goal is to just keep enjoying myself.

The Cannes film festival is about big-budget films but also remarkable films made in different political regimes by film-makers with little resources.

With each film, you are still trying to get the length and measure right. And failure is all about others’ perception of you. When you have one success, they think you know it all. But if you fail, they think they know it all.

I would have to say honestly I was very pleased to be in a film whether it was good or bad with De Niro, Norton and Brando even if I don’t have any scenes with them, I thought it was pretty good company to keep.

The very first film, documentary that I made, was called ‘The First Year.’ It was 11 years ago and I followed these five novice teachers. I was actually with them on their first day of school and followed them for their first year.

You get so lost in the making of a film, and you get so fixed on just, like, every tiny detail. If something doesn’t hit the bullseye in the way you wanted, you become obsessed with that, and you get so just lost in that maze of neurotic thinking.

I asked the producers when I was doing ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ if they could give me a VHS recording of the film that I could show to my family, because in Mexico and Latin America, when you do a film, you don’t expect anybody to see it, especially not in the cinema.

I dubbed for ‘Nannaku Prematho’ because in that film, I was doing a London-based character, and even if some mistake happens with pronunciation, people would excuse it.

And if you’re a golfer and you watch a golf film and Matt Damon swing, and it’s not great, then you’re not going to believe in the golf story, you’re not going to believe in the rest of the film. That’s the whole movie, so if that swing looks like crap, the movie’s crap.

When I first read ‘Lord of the Rings,’ I wanted to see a film of it. But at that time, the technology wasn’t there; there was no such thing as CGI.

You do a film and you know where you’re going, you have this material to stretch and play with as much as possible because you know how it ends.

It’s always good to show that what you’re doing is who you are, what you see on film in the regular season is what you’re seeing at the Senior Bowl.

I loved ‘Saturday Night Fever‘ when I was a kid. I couldn’t believe people talked that way. It was just a whole new culture I didn’t understand. I snuck into it. It was an R-rated film. So it holds a special place.

Even if you do a great performance, if you have a weak link in the film, that’s all anyone remembers.

Yeah, I’m certainly a lot more confident on this one than I was one the last one, which I think can be a good thing and a bad thing. But, at least I slept while making this film.

I’m not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity.

Sometimes there’s something very comforting about a film unfolding more or less as you expect it to.

Film can’t just be a long line of bliss. There’s something we all like about the human struggle.

It’s pretty easy to make a film in China. A few years ago I just walked into the office and let them know I wanted to make a movie called ‘Red Cliff‘ and they were so excited. They said, ‘Let’s do it!’ It’s that simple.

I’m a bit of a shopaholic. I’ve been working in the Bollywood film industry since I was 17, and I have always been financially independent, but I think I would be useless looking after my own money.

I couldn’t be a conventional commercial actor without being a star-kid. That kind of a big film needs a certain mounting, a little paraphernalia around you. And nobody would give me that.

But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.

I learned how to turn it on and turn it off. You learn that in theater, too, but for film work, I learned from doing ‘Henry,’ I learned how to leave work at work and go home. There’s always spillover. Actors speak of this.

That film ‘Memento‘ creeped me out. I was looking over my back through the whole thing. I get more creeped out than scared and spill popcorn all over the place.

If you’re not bruised up, then you’re not doing an action film in a real way.

Gujarat is very close to me. I won my first best actor award for my Gujarati film ‘Kadla Ni Jod.’

I loved doing ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ Because you have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.

You live for those really great scenes where you almost feel that the film has gone beyond what was printed on the script pages and been raised to another level.

I’m not a film buff. I don’t watch a lot of movies.

We shot ‘Breaking Bad‘ on film; we capture ‘Better Call Saul’ digitally. In the shooting of ‘Breaking Bad,’ we would have this steady, handheld, cinema verite sort of look, so we purposely went the opposite way with ‘Better Call Saul’ – locked in the cameras and made the movements smoother and more mechanical.

Professionalism and punctuality are extremely important, especially in the career path I’ve chosen. Being on sets, film schedules can be very stringent and tight. They are sometimes at odd hours in various locations. Being there when you’re called just ensures that the day starts smoothly.

I was making a film on Muhammad Ali in 1964, and I went to Miami to film everything around the fight for the world championship with Sonny Liston. I had the good luck of flying down to Miami, and there was one empty seat, and the guy sitting next to this empty seat was Malcolm X.

I want to better myself with every film. My goal is to be at the highest level someday, and I know I will get there, too. I have strong work ethics.

I grew up idolising Madhuri Dixit, though I wasn’t a Hindi film buff. I had an academic upbringing, and movies were a rarity. I looked up to Madhuri because I loved dancing, and she’s a fantastic dancer.

For me, money has never been an indicator. And it is very sad that each and every film these days is being judged by the money that it makes. It’s a world that I don’t want to be a part of, and I try and stay away from that.

Sunset Boulevard‘ is my favorite film.

Life is more important than ‘what film I do next.’

In film, it’s very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

All I can do is play football, put it on film.

There are so many great actors, but I really have a lot of respect for Johnny Depp. I’ve seen a lot of movies with him in it and, even if it’s a film that wasn’t as successful as you thought it would be, I’ve never seen him put in a bad performance. My favorite actors from history have to be Steve McQueen and James Dean.

I have a studio in a barn at home – we rehearse there, we film there and we record there. It’s fun to hang out with my guys and see what comes out next.

It was the script of ‘VRV’ that brought Gautham Karthik on board. He would not risk his career if he wasn’t confident about the film.

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.

First of all, what in this world does not revolve around money? But money is a big part of film, unlike a lot of other art forms.

Every film is a puzzle really, from an editorial point of view.

I love that feeling you get once you leave a cinema having just watched a movie during the day. Your eyes slowly adjust to the natural light, and your mind, being a little slower, takes its time to separate the images of film from the reality you are suddenly facing.

When you’re in theater or the circus or film – to me it’s all one – affairs happen. People fall in love.

On a big film, there’s almost no way you can meet everyone. On an indie, there are 30 people and no trailers to duck into.

Sometimes you film in your hometown, sometimes you go halfway across the world.

One of the great pleasures of going to see a Daniel Day-Lewis film: you haven’t seen him in five years. Where have you been? So, it’s a special event, right? Well, if you want to go see a movie that I’m in, it still may be a special event for you, but, you don’t feel like you don’t know where I’ve been.

You never compete with the people in your crew; you have your own team. Competition is only with those people whose film is releasing alongside on Friday and never with one’s own team.

I want to work with a wide range of genres because it gives each film a different cinematic energy.

One of the fine moments in 1940s film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one bookstore to another, looks up at a sign.

I have met Jackie Chan about 6 times up ’til now… and even though many people think we are natural enemies, I personally think he is a cool bloke and would honestly love to work with him in a film one time – that would a well brilliant movie!

I really woke up one morning and said, you know, ‘I haven’t seen a good film about the American Revolution. And all the ones I have seen haven’t been successful, but I’m going to make a successful one.’ Well, I wasn’t able to do that.

There is a strange pecking order among actors. Theatre actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn’t have anybody to look down on.

I would recommend ‘Lesson Of The Evil’ to be given as a DVD gift on a child’s 15th birthday. In Japan, children under 15 are not allowed to watch it. Plus, ‘Lesson Of The Evil’ is one film where the older you get, the more you will be able to understand and enjoy the film.

My idea behind the film was to show the struggles an athlete continually endures. There is always a story behind a successful sportsperson. In ‘Soorma,’ we have tried to recreate that.

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder how much more successful I would have been as a coach had it not been for my spending summers on the golf course. I could have watched more film, that’s for sure. One advantage Joe Paterno had over me was that he didn’t play golf.

It used to be that you kind of got pigeonholed into one thing – you’re either a stage actor or a TV actor or a movie actor. Today, there’s a lot of crossover with film actors doing television, which never happened before, so those lines are a little bit more blurred than they used to be.

I was born in Faridabad but brought up in Delhi and Mumbai. My father had been living hand-to-mouth and literally slept on railway platforms when he came to Mumbai for the first time to become a film singer. My parents were both singers; they sang together and fell in love due to their singing.

Tim also has enough confidence so that it always looks like a Tim Burton film, but it really is collaborative. You’re allowed to do it your way but of course he’s always going to choose his way.

To some degree, this re-release is to let people remember what the first ‘Saw’ film was, and let them know there was a time in the ‘Saw’ history where it wasn’t all about blood and traps.

What he’s done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It’s beautifully realised – it’s a beat film.

I’m really passionate about representation in film. I feel like the world is dominated by such a small group of human beings. There are so many different kinds of people that aren’t represented, that don’t have characters who look like them.

To me, spending millions of dollars recreating the world’s sadness with actors and props and sets – it seems like a kind of arrogant waste of money… Unless, that is, it’s a film about an historical event.

When I’m working with Red One, we all have to do everything, from making sets and costumes to tearing tickets. Forget about craft services! So when I get on a film set, it’s a thrill to be just working as an actor.

Director Jai Krishna is an optimist who has a never-say-die attitude. He has impressed me thoroughly with his faith in the industry. Not many are aware of the fact that this man had to wait for almost 30 years in this industry to direct ‘Vanmam,’ his first film.

I would like to, especially in film, play against type and do some heavier stuff. I’m intrigued by projects that deal with problematic people and things.

The multiculturalism of Britain is one of our greatest strengths in music, literature, and visual art, but the TV and film industry doesn’t tap into the multicultural talent pool in the U.K. as much as they do in the U.S.

I didn’t set out to make this kind of picture. It just came my way. But its been going on for me for 16 years now and its wonderful for an actor to work consistently. There seems to be an insatiable audience for this type of film.

When I made my first film, I was arrogant and over-confident.

Awards are an encouragement. An award is not something we aim at while making a film.

As a newcomer, I am eager to try every genre of film making.

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.

My ambition, a long time ago, was to be a film music writer. A compromise then was to be the guy who wrote songs for a band and played slide guitar. Then the singer didn’t turn up for an audition, and I was the only one who knew the words. That was it – bingo! Life took a different course.

Making the ordinary potentially magical is what film should be all about.

I approach every film as my first film.

But it’s a strange thing when people judge you because you’re not doing some big Hollywood film. Are you suggesting I should be in ‘The Dukes of Hazzard?’ I mean, hello?

Honestly, I wanted to play it safe with my first film; I didn’t want to do something completely out of the box.

If you film a little boy going to school, the big event in that boy’s day and all the classmates‘ and teachers’ day is you being there filming, not the school.

I was very excited and interested as a background dancer or as a theatre actor or when I was working on TV, or even on the film which didn’t do well, like ‘Byomkesh.’

The success of a film at the box office will ensure happiness to the entire unit, but individual awards are like vitamin shots that will help boost the morale of an actor.

The next film I’m making is a horror film, and I’m making it with A24. It’s a dark break-up movie that becomes a horror film, set in Sweden. That’s all I can really say now. It’s called ‘Midsommar.’ Everybody’s been spelling it wrong. It’s ‘midsummer’ in Swedish.

The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.

For every film that I have believed in – from ‘Tanu Weds Manu’ to ‘Rehna Hai Tere Dil Mein’ – it was very difficult to find producers.

When an actor thinks he has arrived and become the best one, that’s when your downfall starts. I will always strive to do better than in my last film.

I have no ambitions at all! I have none… seriously. I want to be a good father. I want to be a good husband. I want to be a good son, a good brother, a good family member. I don’t have any ambition to direct a film or write a play. I like acting.

With every film, the pressure is on the rise for the next.

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we’re all stories of our own narrative.

I got into film school. I went and didn’t know anything about it. Over the course of two years, I kind of got kind of good at it. You know, I had a brief moment where I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I didn’t know you needed light to expose film.

In the film business, it’s basically honor among thieves.

A film writer is very much like a party girl. While you’re good-looking and still unlined, the possibilities seem endless. But your appeal doesn’t last long and you’re quickly discarded.

A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she’ll appear in film and it won’t work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don’t know.

Film spectators are quiet vampires.

My education as a film composer, you can’t not – if you like the orchestra like I do, if you are a symphonist like I am – you can’t not listen to John Williams‘ work.

If you make a film about a pig farmer in Wales and you are a huge hit as the pig farmer’s wife, the next thing is you’ll be asked to do a film about a sheep farmer in Scotland.

Since I was 20, I wanted to make a short film and send it to international short film festivals. It never happened. I became too big a star to indulge in those things.

A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

You shouldn’t dream your film, you should make it!

You can’t be pregnant in leotards, and this is the last chance for us to get our bodies into the shape of concert dancers and capture it with the magic of film.

You don’t choose a film because it’s made by a woman, you choose it because it’s good.

No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night‘s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.

There is a strange pecking order among actors. Theatre actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn’t have anybody to look down on.