I've found music over the course of my life is slightly more astoundingly inspiring than great cinema
Cinema is a world of imagination.
There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.
'The Jungle Book.' It's one of the best animated films ever. I saw it when I was small at a cinema in Tehran.
To tell you the truth, I never wanted to become a moviemaker. It was like I was a cinepihile, and I go, like, three or four times per week to the cinema, and I like to watch films.
I have always been clear that cinema is not my priority and that my family is.
Having a movie that lasts and makes your image imprinted into the history of cinema, it's very positive.
I really have problems with horror movies. I don't watch them. It's a feeling I don't want to have in cinema. I'm too reactive. It's too draining to watch that kind of movie.
I will personally never ever get over the communal experience of theatrical cinema. I will never get over the scale of a big screen in relation to your small body, big sounds in a big room with a bunch of other people.
I feel that cinema is my country. But it's not my business.
When I was 16 I discovered this island called cinema and I thought: 'Oh how wonderful, I'm ready.
Cinema is a territory. It exists outside of movies. It's a place I live in. It's a way of seeing things, of experiencing life. But making films, that's supposed to be a profession.
I'm interested in the cultural thing - music, then eventually cinema. I think it's part of my struggle as a cultural worker. I'm not into the armed thing. I cannot be violent.
I'm not hoping to see that day but I know that my cinema will reach Filipinos. I know that they will embrace it one day. It will happen. I'm very sure of that. I still have faith in cinema. I still believe it can affect change.
I really wanted to take the viewer to the 'here and now' regarding the exterminations, and communicate directly in a visceral way. The art of cinema can communicate that way, and that's why I wanted to do it that way.
In American cinema, people will take a chance on you, though they'll often remind you that really, they always liked you.
What I'm doing in writing has been thoroughly and exhaustively explored in other fields like visual art, music, and cinema, yet somehow it's never really been tested on the page.
In this particular business [cinema], you don't choose your own experiences. They start to happen and then they start to peel off and make other ones happen, and then you can start choosing. But it happens to you.
A lot of times in cinema today the women are overly sentimental, so I constantly try to do the opposite. I like strident women.
I have a degree in cinema studies and the big paper I wrote at the end of that was about Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. So I thought that I knew quite a bit about Judy Garland, but I read in passing that the Stonewall riots were a reaction to her death and I had never really read enough to know what that meant or how that could be true. I was interested in that I knew so much about Judy Garland, but I really didn't know this story.
If you say one gets influenced watching a character, I think its foolish. Cinema reflects society; society rarely reflects cinema.
I always loved movies and the cinema; we always used to go to see films as a family.
For me cinema is image, sound, and the faces and bodies and, yes, voices, of my actors, and sometimes the words that they are saying, but not only the words.
I love films where you go into the cinema and loosen the edges of yourself and you hopefully enter into the world of the film. You're watching something unfold before you. I prefer the idea of wonder or intense wonder over shock or something.
I've always had an innate ability to dance, but I'm not as spiffy as those cinema legends like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
