American Cinema Quotes & Sayings

I think there's a fear of difference in American cinema. — Ira Sachs

Hollwood creates useful entertainment. There are millions of people on earth who need distraction and American cinema fulfills that function. — Claude Lelouch

In France, if you have any sort of talent, you'd better keep it here. And if you're going to go abroad, it had better not be America. The old battle - American versus Frog cinema. It's ridiculous. — Jean Reno

I am sure that the two main forms of English, American English and British English, separated geographically from the beginning and severed politically since 1776, are continuing to move apart, and that existing elements of linguistic dissimilarity between them will intensify as time goes on, notwithstanding the power of the cinema, TV, Time Magazine, and other two-way gluing and fuelling devices. — Robert Burchfield

I was a young film student around the time of the new wave in film in the 1970s; old Hollywood was naff and over. For me, as a film student, I was going to see French and Italian cinema; American cinema was 'Easy Rider' and 'Taxi Driver.' Everything was gritty. — Gillian Armstrong

It's a mistake and misconception to think that one has to state everything clearly and simply for the audience to be able to follow the character, and this is what is bringing American cinema down from its position in the classic golden period. There's this misapprehension that the audience is not smart. — Asghar Farhadi

The scene of independent cinema is already a large scene in America, and not in a negative way, but it's cluttered. It's very populated with just American films, so the room left for foreign movies is not extremely vast. The American public also does not really read. They don't read subtitles. But we're like that in Canada, too. — Xavier Dolan

I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early '60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them. — Stephen Rea

I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene. — Lee Daniels

Imagine, there is almost no possibility for a foreign language film to be distributed in America right now. That doesn't just make the industry poorer, it makes the landscape of cinema poorer, in America. The impossibility to get a good release on a really good European, Latin American, Asian movie is a tragedy. — Guillermo Del Toro

In American cinema, people will take a chance on you, though they'll often remind you that really, they always liked you. — Kim Basinger

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality. — Manuel Puig

The most important question in American cinema, I've learned, is 'When is lunch?' — Tommy Lee Jones

To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris. — A.J. Liebling

On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why? — Gurinder Chadha

I had seen 'Do the Right Thing' when I was at college, and it was incredibly inspiring as a piece of cinema. Just brilliant, I thought. But saw 'Malcolm X' with a crowded audience. It was my first time in an American cinema, hearing an audience respond. You know, in England, everyone is so restrained. — Justin Chadwick

American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema. — Sergei Eisenstein

Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula and it's up to us to try to change it ... I feel like a preacher! But it's really true. I feel personally responsible for the future of American cinema. Me personally. — Alexander Payne

Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That's why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society. — Jean-Luc Godard

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus. — Michael Haneke

I'm getting a little bored by the juxtaposition of American and other cinema. I no longer think this division is as true as it might have been in the 1980s, or the early part of the 90s. — Wim Wenders

French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema. — Louis Leterrier

I don't want all of American cinema to be big cartoons that are just made to be digested by the entire world. — Alexander Payne

In the film industry, all the money is focused on television and the stupidity of American cinema. — Gerard Depardieu

We want to assist China's soft power; we want to develop a vibrant young cinema in China. The average American has no understanding whatsoever of China. We'd like to create a young generation to tell their stories on a world stage. We can make history as well as make money. — Robert Friedland

I think there's a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are. — Mohsin Hamid

Cinema explains American society. It's like a Western, with good guys and bad guys, where the weak don't have a place. — Jacques Delors

I think Hollywood has gone in a disastrous path. It's terrible. The years of cinema that were great were the '30s, '40s, not so much the '50s ... but then the foreign films took over and it was a great age of cinema as American directors were influenced by them and that fueled the '50s and '60s and '70s. — Woody Allen

I think American cinema, particularly, has become so disposable. It's not even cinema, It's just moviemaking. — Eriq La Salle

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis. — Tom Hooper

American films, it's a money-making industry. And in France, you can find great respect for cinema as art. — Woody Allen

I felt privileged to be a facet of such a jewel in the crown of American cinema. — Tatum O'Neal

From the American newspapers you'd think America was populated solely by naked women and cinema stars. — Nancy Astor

In the U.S., some extraordinary movies have been made on politics and social issues. We learned lots of things from American cinema. But in the last ten or fifteen years, this has changed drastically. Today, that kind of movie is much easier to make in Europe. — Costa-Gavras

Cinema is capitalism in its purest form ... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema. — Jean-Luc Godard

North American cinema is the only true weapon of mass destruction. It has achieved to convince the audience not only that it's the best possible cinema, but that it is the only. — Arturo Ripstein

The blue collar milieu was something that I really understood and resonated with me and I thought was underrepresented in American cinema. — Christian Bale

When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable. — Michael Haneke

OUCH

"The arrabal (a term used for poor neighbourhoods in Argentina and Uruguay) and carpa (informal mobile theatre set up inside tents, once common in Latin America), with their caliente (hot) rhythms such as the rumba or the cha-cha-cha, were conquering audiences all over the world, a trend allegorised in song lyrics about their popularity among the French and other non-Latin Americans - "The Frenchman has fun like this/as does the German/and the Irishman has a ball/as does even the Muslim" ("Cachita") - even as they filtered in the presence of a blackness - "and if you want to dance/look for your Cachita/and tell her "Come on negrita"/let's dance" - denied in the official discourse of those Spanish=speaking countries wielding the greatest economic power in the region: namely, Argentina and Mexico, the latter of which would eventually incorporate Afro-Latin American culture into its cinema - although being careful to mark it as Cuban and not Mexican. — Robert McKee Irwin

Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh - they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh's Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia. — Ingmar Bergman

Even in the realest American cinema that I see, there's still not that sense that this is reality. There's still that sense that you are watching a movie. And hopefully, if we did get our jobs right, that sense disappears when you watch this movie. — Joshua Leonard

The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to. — Michael Caine

Dancer, bride, runaway wife, radical filmmaker and pioneer -
Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema. — Manohla Dargis

American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world. — Ben Dreyfuss

You don't watch many movies, do you?"
"Fraid not," he said. "I never had much interest in movies. 'Sides that, the nearest cinema was almost two hours from my home."
"What about cable TV?"
"No cable."
"Satellite?"
"Nope."
"No Internet either?"
He shook his head.
"Are you serious?" she asked, incredulous. "How did you ever survive?"
"Where I come from, there was always something more interesting to do outside."
"And where was that?" she asked. "Mars? — Victoria Vane

But alas, the cinema has taken our breath away so often, investing us in all the splendors of the splendidest American millionaire, or all the heroics and marvels of the Somme or the North Pole, that life has now no magnate richer than we, no hero nobler than we have been, on the film. Connu! Connu! Everything life has to offer is known to us, couldn't be known better, from the film. — D.H. Lawrence

France loves American cinema because when an American remake is successful, it makes us money to produce more French films. — Clotilde Hesme

The American independent cinema is as formulaic as Hollywood and one genre is what you might call the 'inaction movie'. The setting is invariably a decaying town in a regional backwater where a catalytic stranger or returning native meets up with a group of sad, eccentric outsiders. — Philip French

I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema. — Quentin Tarantino

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. — Jean-Luc Godard

I always had this huge respect for American filmmakers and American actors. I always had this very strong love and respect for the American cinema. I always knew that I was going to leave Sweden. — Noomi Rapace

Joe looked out of the window again. He had the feeling that outside the window there should have been hover-cars, men in trilby hats and jet packs, spider-webs of passageways spreading out of the distant tops of the towers. There should have been women in silver suits taking in a show at the tri-vids before indulging in a spot of lunch, the kind that came in three-course pills, great big subservient robots trailing behind them. Instead there was a brown man in overalls collecting rubbish with a long stick outside an adult cinema, and the cars were halted, bumper-to-bumper, beside a traffic light that seemed to be stuck permanently on red. There was a siren in the distance. There was the sound of car horns, a door slamming, someone cursing loudly in American English. — Lavie Tidhar

I had no aspirations to be part of American cinema ... I was really a Europe-based person, and those were the films I was inspired by. — Jacqueline Bisset

American commercial cinema has long been dominated by men, but I don't think there has ever been another time when women have been as underrepresented on screen as they are now. The biggest problem isn't genuinely independent cinema, where lower budgets mean more opportunities for women in front of and behind the camera. The problem is the six major studios that dominate the box office, the entertainment chatter and the popular imagination. Their refusal to hire more female directors is immoral, maybe illegal, and has helped create and sustain a representational ghetto for women. — Manohla Dargis

Klemperer detected a certain "hysteria of language" in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation - "This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!" - and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, "copied from American cinema and thrillers," that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In — Erik Larson

The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life. — Bernardo Bertolucci

Action roles - or any role - should go to the best guy for the job. People obsess about nationality. Hollywood and America might be the hub for pop culture and cinema for the Western world, but that shouldn't suggest that all the roles should go to young American men. — Jai Courtney

American cinema is international like the fairy tales were international. — Bertrand Tavernier

Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema. — Andrzej Wajda