Filmmaking Quotes

“Wednesdays are for writers, and directors, and actors. Wednesdays are for creating art, and poetry, and poetry in motion. Wednesdays are for protest, and rebellion, and artivism. Wednesdays, are for words from my notebook.”
― N'Zuri Za Austin

“When you’re putting a scene together, the three key things you are deciding over and over again are: What shot shall I use? Where shall I begin it? Where shall I end it? An average film may have a thousand edits in it, so: three thousand decisions. But if you can answer those questions in the most interesting, complex, musical, dramatic way, then the film will be as alive as it can be.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

“They've forgotten about beds, and I understand, because once you set sail on a movie, you are out of touch with ordinary land. Movie-makers between movies seem like you and me; they go to parties, they shop, they swim. But they're just treading water, waiting for another injection, another ship to come take them away in film. And money has nothing to do with it.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“When you’re putting a scene together, the three key things you are deciding over and over again are: What shot shall I use? Where shall I begin it? Where shall I end it? An average film may have a thousand edits in it, so: three thousand decisions. But if you can answer those questions in the most interesting, complex, musical, dramatic way, then the film will be as alive as it can be.”
― Walter Murch, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

“I was always bad at reading scripts. Back then, I’d be offered millions of dollars to do movies and barely crack the first few pages. I’m embarrassed to admit that now, given that these days I’m writing scripts myself and it’s like pulling teeth to get actors to respond. Maybe they feel how I used to feel: that in a life of fun and fame and money, reading a script, no matter the size of the number attached, feels all too much like school.

The universe will teach you, though. All those years I was too this, too that, to read a script, but last year I wrote a screenplay for myself and was trying get it made until I realized that I was too old to play the part. Most fifty-three-year-olds have worked their shit out already, so I needed to hire a thirty-year-old. The one I chose took weeks and weeks to respond, and I couldn’t believe how rude his behavior was.”
― Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

“When people are deeply “in” a film, you’ll notice that nobody coughs at certain moments, even though they may have a cold. If the coughing were purely autonomic response to smoke or congestion, it would be randomly constant, no matter what was happening on screen. But the audience holds back at certain moments, and I’m suggesting blinking is something like coughing in this sense. There is a famous live recording of pianist Sviatoslav Richter playing Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition during a flu epidemic in Bulgaria many years ago. It is just as plain as day what’s going on: While he was playing certain passages, no one coughed. At those moments, he was able to suppress, with his artistry, the coughing impulse of 1,500 sick people.”
― Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing

“I feel that one of the reasons I enjoy having films that are historical or revisionist history or a period film is because I think it's one of the things that cinema can do best. It can do it [well] in two areas. One is that you can recreate the past in a movie and present it in a fictional way, because we know what it looked like. And the second reason is, by having time pass, you can examine the truth about something that happened in the past, because you've been able to look at it through the prism of time.”
― Robert Zemeckis

“It’s a beautiful thing to be in Hollywood... the feeling of it... that classical glamour never dies.” She walked to the closet and back to the bed. “The actress lives a beautiful life once at a certain level... when her sink has a view and her phone calls aren’t rejections anymore, but producers, offices, playhouses in London, a director pitching his sacred screenplay. The food gets healthier, people around you are more positive... driving in traffic is even different because your car is nice, and the music you normally hate sounds different when life works... when you get the furniture you want... And mentors pass down movie posters from their mentors—so Hepburn never really dies. You keep it in your home... there’s room for everything... I treasure letters from other artists... studio invitations... Being a woman in Hollywood is entirely different than a man’s experience. All the time, by everyone, for everything, a woman is wanted... dinners... so many dinners... so many scripts lying around the room, in the sun... the people you have yet to meet... it’s not about fame—I do not care for the public praise... but what is truly compelling is when you make it big, you finally understand why there are palm trees in this city... Los Angeles suddenly turns on. Like a bulb you thought disliked you and would never light. But it lights. Of course, one must put the cocktail down, leave the house, and make more movies. But this is to say, the after hours are nice. When the camera is off and I return home, I get to love what is left.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“The story was okay, but the acting bothered Andrei. Sometimes he would watch a scene and then it would go to the next; Andrei would blink, bewildered at the time that had passed. The film just went by. Scenes would jump to the next but his mind was the same. Why? He noticed that the lead actress in her later years was extremely gorgeous, except some sharp concentration in him blocked out her beauty. This seated heart screamed for the movie to shatter him. And it drew upon him that this was another film that the world was not bothered by of its acting. In fact, they did not even see it. In its short scenes, audiences were hypnotized for an average of five to eight seconds by an actor’s beauty and if the editor timed it right, and with enough spectacle, movies could get away with doing nothing. Gorgeousness stimulated the mind. “Wow, they are so beautiful,” the audience was forced to think—and then by jumping to the next beautiful part fast enough there was something called a movie. And the movie seemed to use the actors’ appearances to drive most of the scenes. And many actors in different scenes sort of just stood there, handsome, and whispering. That was their strategy—mumbling murmurs of breath and rasp. Their indecisive bodies were unnaturally still, as though they had close-ups when the shot was wide. All of the actors’ voices were dumbly lowered to a safe natural cadence while in an unnatural situation and yet seeming real, no actual thought needed to be shown.

'Beauty is good,' says the industry. 'Sell that. Sell beauty! Make it beautiful. Ugly stories about beautiful people. It naturally turns a crap film into a decent one. The people are left with a good impression, as though having watched something fascinating. Make sure to let the camera sit on those beautiful people and their faces will give the audience something impossible to understand and give us runtime while they gaze. But having ugly people in it, people that look like people, actors that look like their audience—er, that’s not so profound,' says the industry. It was why the scenes moved without Andrei knowing: nothing was done by its actors.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“What’s The Difference (Sonnet 1037)

If a scientist has no humility,
what's the difference between
a scientist and a computer!
If a doctor has no warmth,
what's the difference between
a doctor and a butcher!

If a teacher has no curiosity,
what's the difference between
a teacher and a circus trainer!
If a filmmaker has no originality,
what's the difference between
a filmmaker and a photocopier!

If a cop cannot practice self-correction,
what's the difference between
a cop and an executioner!
If a theologian has no integrative spirit,
what's the difference between
a theologian and a mumbling parrot!

If a modern human cannot balance reason and warmth,
what's the difference between a sentient human
and a creature from the swamp!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“If a filmmaker has no originality, what's the difference between a filmmaker and a photocopier!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“Even if you know nothing about the process of filmmaking…you can sense the fear, excitement, and risk that went into a scene like that. For the writer to conceive it, for the director to facilitate it, for the actors to execute it, and for the editor to hinge it to the flow of a thousand other moments with as much gambled on them.”
― Patton Oswalt, Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

“Mechanical rule produces similar stories like goods produced in a plant. Every strong and original narrative structure is crafted personally. The unique philosophical belief system, as well as the cultural value of a particular society, is the ultimate headwaters of original and compelling narrative structure.”
― DB Thakuri, HEADWATERS OF SCREENWRITING: The Art of Crafting Original Screenplays

“Magic is real. It is artistic expression and creative endeavour.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“one of the central responsibilities of the editor, which is to establish an interesting, coherent rhythm of emotion and thought — on the tiniest and the largest scales — that allows the audience to trust, to give themselves to the film.”
― Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing

“Harvey Weinstein took pride in not paying bills,” recounted Miramax’s former chief financial officer John Schmidt. “But when you stiff a filmmaker you are stiffing the very lifeblood of what your business is. The whole independent film business is based on championing the small guy.”
― Ken Auletta, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

“Trying to make a movie is a tawdry, soul-crushing, stress-inducing, backstabbing, sleep-deprived, caffeine-overdosed nightmare—and that's just Tuesday.”
― Don Roff

“Keep in mind that a person says only ten percent of what lies in his head, ninety percent remains unspoken”
― Constantin Stanislavski

“I want to create the type of cinema that shows by not showing. This is very different from most movies nowadays, which are not literally pornographic but are in essence pornographic, because they show so much that they take away any possibility of imagining things for ourselves. My aim is to give the chance to create as much as possible in our minds, through creativity and imagination. I want to tap the hidden information that’s within yourself and that you probably didn’t even know existed inside you.”
― Abbas Kiarostami

“Hindi films are known and enjoyed worldwide for their songs and dances. These days it is fashionable to battle tradition by using a Western format of telling stories, where music stays in the background. I can't wrap my head around it. I don't think it helps the story move forward. I also believe that a film gets a lot of repeat value when an actor is wooing an actress with a popular song. We represent a dream world and our audiences love it. It may seem old-fashioned but I firmly believe that lip-syncing (by an actor) is the best way to picturize a song, to maximize its appeal. It simply does not have the same magic when the song is played in the background.”
― Rishi Kapoor, Khullam Khulla: Rishi Kapoor Uncensored

“Cameras have a special kind of magic. You can reframe the familiar and make the everyday seem extraordinary. That's why I adore them.”
― Rebecca Ryder, The Dream To End All Dreams

“Each time, the fall looked brilliant and effectively dangerous against the green screen, but he wasn’t satisfied until he stuck the landing and heard the rebound clap. Everyone from riggers to grips marked the occasion with good, honest cheers reverberating in the giant, hollow cube.”
― Laurie Perez, Unbraiding: Actor | Producer | Father: A Story in Three Strands

“Well, Strictly Business (1991) got one of the highest ratings ever from a test screening - and that movie was a piece of shit.”
― Spike Lee

“Scottish film culture - or, more accurately, its discrete sections - has been highly politicised in the past. The problem has been the nature of the politics in question. Take Scottish filmmaking as example. On one hand, Scottish film workers have presented a picture of individualist effort which would gladden the heart of Margaret Thatcher and which, theoretically at any rate, should have produced a great variety of films of very diverse aesthetic and, therefore, political tendencies. On the other, however, these same film workers were forced to compete with each other for limited funds disbursed by a few key Scottish institutions of patronage, the powerful voices of which, historically, have been extremely reactionary. Small wonder, then, that Scottish films critical of established aesthetic forms, cultural atitudes and political arrangements have been the exception rather than the rule.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“The first time Polly Platt met Jim Brooks to discuss Terms of Endear­ment (1983), she was distinctly unimpressed. “I was infuriated that he was that late,” she recalls. “Fifteen minutes or half an hour, who cares, but to be a whole hour late.” She waited for him at Gladstone’s, a tacky tourist joint on the Pacific Coast Highway. “I just remember I didn’t like him ... I just didn’t like his turn of phrase ... I didn’t like the way he referred to the people. I didn’t like the people he was talk­ing about working with.”
― Rachel Abramowitz, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: The Truth About Female Power in Hollywood

“Like many junior executives, Dawn Steel served as punching bag/chum for her bosses. Once the marketing chief, Frank Mancuso, asked her to tell Steven Spielberg the release date of one of his movies; Spielberg immediately retorted, “Who are you to tell me when the release date is?”
― Rachel Abramowitz, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: Women's Experience of Power in Hollywood

“If I were to be asked what is most lacking and what I would most like to see in Scottish filmmaking today, I would say the union of the king of mis-en-scene which is steeped in cinematic history and gives us maximum cinematic pleasure, with a hard political analysis of Scottish history and contemporary Scotland.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“What do you get when you watch a Mike Leigh film? Nothing. Except the uncomfortable feeling that a group of actors have been denied a writing credit.”
― Richard Ayoade, The Grip of Film

“This is the micro-budget philosophy of creativity: make the most of every given situation by forcing cinema to match your circumstance. Instead of making your circumstances match a generic conception of cinema, renovate cinematic standards to accommodate your limitations. Remake the cinematic language to tell your stories.”
― Jake Mahaffy, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means

“The entire point of painting was not to make a pretty picture but to discover true beauty in the way things actually are.8 The canvas was just an excuse to look at reality more closely. This is how we find new meaning in the things we don't understand.”
― Jake Mahaffy, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means