80 Quotes About Filmmaking

Use filmmaking to eliminate racism — use to it terminate misogyny — use it to destroy homophobia and all other primitiveness. Abhijit Naskar

The art of filmmaking is the most influential form of art that has ever existed throughout the history of human artistic endeavors. Abhijit Naskar

A movie is not a movie, it is a potential nuclear furnace of inspiration, courage and conscience. Abhijit Naskar

Make movies my friend — make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul. Abhijit Naskar

Use filmmaking for a greater purpose, than to just entertain some drowsy minds. Wake the whole world up with your movies. It has been sleeping for long. Its eternal sleep has become its darkest nemesis. Now is the time to wake it up. Abhijit Naskar

Take the clapper and become the alarm that the world so desperately needs. Abhijit Naskar

Whatever genre you deem suitable for your taste — romance, comedy, action, mystery, sci-fi or anything else, make sure it has the plain everyday human kindness. Abhijit Naskar

Success involves failing first. Ask any successful person. Ask any experienced person, really. It's all part of the creative process, so sit back and allow the artist within you to sprout, blossom and flourish. You must accept that your first, second, and third attempt at something might suck. It's a necessary step in improving your skill. Failure is your teacher, not your judge. Connor Franta

Without art, a film is pure wastage of time and resources. Abhijit Naskar

When an image depends on the next for a complete meaning, it moves the story and audience along without choking them with pathos Val Uchendu

I am not an actress. I am a mistress of disguise. Acting happens to be one of the perks Janna Cachola

Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important. John Cassavetes

When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit. Unknown

Gratitude is the gateway to a positive life. A.D. Posey

Transform into your dream. A.D. Posey

Walk into the unknown with what you know in your heart. A.D. Posey

As important as color is to a painting, or wings to a bird. Music injects vibrancy to film and makes it soar! Gerard De Marigny

It was hard to know what to make of the brothers' dark infatuation with death. It was strange, wildly anomalous in sun-baked Southern California, where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows. Peter Biskind

People never forget two things, their first love and the money they wasted watching a bad movie. Amit Kalantri

Audience can live without a movie but a movie cannot live without an audience. Amit Kalantri

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect Werner Herzog

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again. Unknown

Without writers, stories would not be written, Without actors, stories could not be brought to life. AngieMarie Delsante

I Create. I don't "Need".Meaning: I don't need advice or criticism. Unless you're offering money, weed, or whiskey save it. Thanks. Jonathan Heatt

Don’t let the daily routine kill your creativity. Remember who you were before you got that job. Morr Meroz

If you cannot live with hope and create with intention or be kind to a stranger, bury your head. You are not living at all. Dawn Garcia

Creativity is a gift each one of us is born with, irrespective of our backgrounds and entitlement of culture, The challenge is to hold onto this gift as we go through life. To nurture it. To encourage it. Because every single day we encounter forces that would rather it went away. Unknown

To make a real independent film where the filmmaker is in charge creatively, one must sacrifice personal, financial, and physical well-being. Mark Polish

We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas for an I-Pad. Celluloid isn't just nostalgic, it's an art form and, like it or not, it's superior to digital. It lasts much longer, it provides grain and brighter colors, and it takes more effort so that it produces something wonderful. With the inferior binary codes, pixels and untested shelf-life of digital files, plus the fact that these days anyone with a digital camera, even a two-year-old, can make a video and pollute the world with self-photography and cat pictures, film has a lot more integrity and worth than digital. Rebecca McNutt

To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed. Christopher J. Nolan

Oscar may be the world’s most glorious way of honoring your work, but the real award for a filmmaker is the contentment which you receive from making your film. Abhijit Naskar

Later film shoots’ casting calls would advertise that they’re “fun shoots” and a “good way to get exposure”–but working in entertainment is not entertaining, even though it is not what’s traditionally thought of as “work.” You know what’s fun, indie filmmakers? Being paid for your time. J. Richard Singleton

Regardless of the subject of my films … I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see a man weeping at the bus stop, when I observe people struggling vainly to get close to others, when I see someone eating up the left-overs in a cheap restaurant, when I see the first blotches on a woman's hand and know that she too is bitterly aware of them, when I see the kind of appalling and irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face. I want this pain to come across to my audience, to see this physical agony, which I think I am beginning to fathom, to seep into my work. Unknown

Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady — “that last great infirmity of the soul” — which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care. . Billy Marshall Stoneking

All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories. John Yorke

Success or Failure, there should always be a Drive to Keep on Creating. Henry Johnson Jr

A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress. Abhijit Naskar

Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about. Abhijit Naskar

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. Abhijit Naskar

Healthy entertainment is a beautiful blend of stimuli that can connect with the viewer at a sentimental level, then sow the seeds of a certain idea or feed the mind with inspiration and courage. In short, healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. This leads to not only an entertained viewer, but also an inspired soul. And that should be the purpose of film-making, and indeed the entire entertainment industry, rather than feeding the general population with garbage. . Abhijit Naskar

The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels. Mylo Carbia

I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl. D.W. Griffith

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out Martin Scorsese

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself. Peter Greenaway

The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way. Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence. Robert Bresson

If you can film an idea in your mind, follow that film idea shot for shot, scene for scene, that idea is worth making. Craig Mapp

... the midpoint of each film is the moment when each protagonist embraces for the first time the quality they will need to become complete and finish their story. It's when they discover a truth about themselves. John Yorke

A lot of film people are like that— especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them. It's not about art or ideas. It's about working at something and making it come out right. Paul Auster

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it. Unknown

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water. Robert Bresson

You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it. Unknown

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters. Sidney Lumet

Yet in recent years I have witnessed a new phenomenon among filmgoers, especially those considered intelligent and perceptive. I have a name for this phenomenon: the Instant White-out. People are closeted in cozy darkness; they turn off their mobile phones and willingly give themselves, for ninety minutes or two hours, to a new film that got a fourstar rating in the newspaper. They follow the pictures and the plot, understand what is spoken either in the original tongue or via dubbing or subtitles, enjoy lush locations and clever scenes, and even if they find the story superficial or preposterous, it is not enough to pry them from their seats and make them leave the theatre in the middle of the show. But something strange happens. After a short while, a week or two, sometimes even less, the film is whitened out, erased, as if it never happened. They can’t remember its name, or who the actors were, or the plot. The movie fades into the darkness of the movie house, and what remains is at most a ticket stub left accidentally in one’s pocket. A.B. Yehoshua

The varying physical characteristics of the actors may also necessitate changes. Sean Connery is six feet four. Dustin Hoffman isn't. Sidney Lumet

In order to get [Mean Streets] made I had to learn how to make a movie, " says Scorsese. "I didn't learn how to make a movie in film school. What you learned in film school was to express yourself with pictures and sound. But learning to make a movie is totally different. Peter Biskind

The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself. Mike Figgis

The score is in your subconscious. Sit down long enough at a keyboard and it will come out. Jonathan Heatt

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window. David Fincher

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff. David Cronenberg

I wasn't a kid who moved out from Iowa with aspirations of becoming a famous star - I was intrigued by the idea of filmmaking and by the idea of what it would be like to play a character in a movie. Jason Lee

I really took filmmaking very seriously... It was an honor and then a crutch also, because at a young age, I was like, I guess I'm a serious filmmaker. I never set out to be a serious filmmaker. I just set out to make movies. John Singleton

I got into filmmaking in order to tell very personal stories, and in this day and age, the opportunity seems all the more precious. Ira Sachs

The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture. Christopher Nolan

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form. George Hickenlooper

I think everything that you do, you're learning. I mean, every movie that you make is like a film school; that's one of the things that I enjoy about filmmaking. Peter Jackson

In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims. Joshua Oppenheimer

The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself. Peter Jackson

Technology continues to bring us wondrous advances in filmmaking to improve how we view movies. Ridley Scott

Everyone loves the seventies because that's when movies were character-based, and you saw great characters and you saw very interesting filmmaking. There are interesting movies being made now, but it's harder and harder to make them. Justin Bartha

Filmmaking can be a fine art. Terri Windling

Part of filmmaking is always a guessing game, and part of it is always a game of trust. Greg Kinnear