Quote of the Week

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Quote of the Week

"I think acting should look as if we're working a little. Which is a very old-fashioned theory today. See, we mustn't have any idea that anybody knows the camera's on them at all. You see, it's just 'life.' Well, we all have life, twenty-four... twelve hours a day. Sometimes we want to forget life. I think it should be a little larger than life. A little bit theatrical."

Bette Davis

Quote of the Week

"Those incredible men that we worked for, that seemed to us so inartistic, and so lacking in knowledge of the art part of making a movie. But they had something. And they had something, you don't know what it was, it was a kind of a magic, gambling, intuitive thing. That has gone. We now have oil companies owning the studios; it's all business today. And those men [the old studio heads], they were exasperating, because there was no way of communicating with the way they thought. But they -- boy! -- they gave us our chances. They gambled... Gambling has gone."

Bette Davis on the Dick Cavett Show

Quote of the Week

"Post-1980 time travel films like The Philadelphia Experiment (1984) and Back to the Future (1985) are obliged to feature the gag in which a disbelieving inhabitant of a naive past discovers that Ronald Reagan is in the White House. 'And who's Secretary of the Treasury,' Christopher Lloyd asks Michael J. Fox, 'Jack Benny?' The joke, persisting well after the Reagan presidency in Late for Dinner (1990), comes from an awareness that a film-goer of the 1940s or 1950s would be unable to conceive of a future in which a second-string movie star is President. Though the New Hollywood is increasingly self-aware, as witness the inside approaches of The Player (1992) or Last Action Hero (1993), no time travel film dares suggest that a 1940s film-goer warped into any year after 1977 would find it ridiculous that Star Wars (1977, derived from Flash Gordon), Superman (1978), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), or Dick Tracy (1990) were big-budget, A-ticket movies. The originals of these properties were despised, marginalized efforts, creeping out of 'poverty row,' playing to children at Saturday matinees. As a new generation of baby-boom executives take control of the product, time-travellers from the 1960s would now face the spectacle of a future in which the throwaway media of their own time has been reincarnated in major studio reruns of Batman (1989), The Addams Family (1991), The Fugitive (1992), and Maverick (1994). . . David O. Selznick and Louis B. Mayer would never have considered making the films which constitute Variety's current box-office top ten, though they would have understood Gandhi (1982) if Paul Muni had been available. Even if Beverly Hills Cop (1984) or Ghostbusters (1983) had been green-lighted in the golden age of Hollywood, they would have been double-bill fillers with Abbott and Costello or the Bowery Boys."

Kim Newman, in Oxford History of World Cinema, p. 509

Quote of the Week

"Hey, I like this. Early nothing."

Gloria Grahame, The Big Heat

Quote of the Week

"I'm rather sick of all this kissing at the talk shows. Of course, that's the old Yankee thing in me. I don't use first names immediately; I don't kiss people I don't know. I just don't. I've seen a lot of people I don't know I'd liked to have kissed, but I didn't."

Bette Davis

Quote of the Week

"I just shot it the way you see a thing. I shoot straightforward too. I resent camera movements that you become conscious of. I don't use any camera tricks. The camera is usually eye height. The audience sees just what we see."

Howard Hawks

Quote of the Week

"They have goaded and jaded their artistic feelings too much to enjoy anything simply beautiful. They are aesthetes; and the definition of an aesthete is a man who is experienced enough to admire a good picture, but not inexperienced enough to see it."

G.K. Chesterton

Quote of the Week

"Genres were never rigid. Creative filmmakers kept stretching their boundaries. This was a classical art where personal expression was stimulated rather than inhibited by discipline."

Martin Scorsese (on classic Hollywood)

Quote of the Week

"Today, studios don't exist anymore. Sure, you can go in and shoot there, but you move in like you move into the Ramada Inn. You finish shooting, you finish cutting, and it's 'Goodbye Charlie.' It's no fun anymore. Not the real fun which we had. Paramount made fifty pictures a year, and even if a picture failed, you went on and on, because to the bosses you were as good as the best thing you had ever done."

Billy Wilder

Quote of the Week

"I don't think the film has a grammar. I don't think film has but one form. If a good film results, then that film has created its own grammar."

Yasujiro Ozu

Quote of the Week

"I have always felt that visual literacy is just as important as verbal literacy. What the film pioneers were exploring was the medium's specific techniques. In the process, they invented a new language based on images rather than on words, a visual grammar you might say: close-ups, irises, dissolves, masking part of the frame for emphasis, dolly shots, tracking shots. These are the basic tools that directors have at their disposal to create and heighten the illusion of reality."

Martin Scorsese

Quote of the Week

"He gave us the grammar of filmmaking. He understood the psychic strength of the lens."

Lillian Gish (on D.W. Griffith)

Quote of the Week

"I am often asked by younger filmmakers: Why do I need to look at old movies? The only response I can give them is: I still consider myself a student. Yes, I have made a number of pictures in the past twenty years. But the more pictures I make, the more I realize that I really don't know... Do what painters used to do, and probably still do. Study the old masters. Enrich your palette. Expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn."

Martin Scorsese

Quote of the Week

"When taking close-ups in a colour picture, there is too much visual information in the background, which tends to draw attention away from the face. That is why the faces of the actresses in the old black and white pictures are so vividly remembered. Even now, movie fans nostalgically recall Dietrich... Garbo... Lamarr... Why? Filmed in black and white, those figures looked as if they were lit from within. When a face appeared on the screen over-exposed -- the high-key technique, which also erased imperfections -- it was as if a bright object was emerging from the screen."

Nestor Almendros

Quote of the Week

"I don't like close-ups unless you can get a kick out of them, unless you need them. If you can get away with attitudes and positions that show the feeling of the scene, I think you're better off using the close-up only for absolute punctuation -- that's the reason you do it. And you save it -- not like TV where they do everything in close-up."

Howard Hawks

Quote of the Week

"All this compulsion to understand everything fills me with horror."
Luis Bunuel, My Last Sigh

Quote of the Week

"There is a dreadful story that I hate actors. I can't imagine how such a rumor began. Of course it may possibly be because I was once quoted as saying that actors are cattle. My actor friends know I would never be capable of such a thoughtless, rude and unfeeling remark... What I probably said was that actors should be treated like cattle."
Alfred Hitchcock