Art Films Quotes & Sayings

Everyone's attention span is getting shorter. As a result, everything - films, music, art - gets watered down and dumber. Every now and again, you get something great, but not often. — Kelis

I had just finished reading The Day of the Locust when this piece was brought to my attention, and I was like, "How do you create art in the system, the way it is?" Looking around the studio film landscape, there are all of these great superhero movies, which is fantastic, especially for my kids, but it's hard to find real art house films in the studio system, these days. — Matt Bomer

I've always loved animation it's the reason why I do what I do for a living - the films of Walt Disney. This art form is so spectacular and beautiful. And I never quite understood the feeling amongst animation studios that audiences today only wanted to see computer animation. It's never about the medium that a film is made in, it's about the story. It's about how good the movie is. — John Lasseter

Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world. — Stellan Skarsgard

I think a smart person today realizes that you have to be part of the art films that are done just for the sake of the art. — Halle Berry

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art
novels, poems, plays, paintings or films
can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world. — Alain De Botton

My father came to Chennai at the age of 16 from a village in Coimbatore. He was an artist and was clear he wanted to do something, so he came to Chennai and joined an art course for eight years before he came into films. — Suriya

The great hope is that people who wouldn't normally make films will be making them. Suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father's camera and for once the so called professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever - and it will really become an art form. — Francis Ford Coppola

I think it's always hard for people to get their head around the fact that populist, commercial films can also actually be great works of art. — Helen Mirren

I think Chelsea Girls is a complete masterpiece and I think Andy's [Warhol] films are equally as good as the art. I think one day they will be considered equal. They aren't yet. They will be. — John Waters

I've stopped going to see art films because every critic gives them four stars and say things like 'masterpiece,' 'spellbinding' and 'mesmerizing.' I mean, they're doing that with my film, but I don't want to use those blurbs. Critical reviews aren't worth too much anymore because just about every film can get one or two of them. — Terry Zwigoff

Making films is great. You've got 100 people around and you're all dressing up and making weird art-it's a fun group activity. — Sean Lennon

I find that it's a very odd thing to think of competition when you're talking about what I still think of as art. I don't think of competing with actors or filmmakers at all. You do compete, in a way, at the box office, but we're far enough apart when both films are coming out that I'm not concerned with that either. — George Clooney

I think about all the people who have created something that lives after them - works of art, plays, music, films, literature, poetry that will be read, seen, performed, and heard for the rest of time. If I could do something that lives after me, then I think I will have had a life well led. — Seamus Dever

I was born in a world of opera, theatre, films, poetry, art, and therefore, out of the wire, I made a stage. That's why they call me a high wire artist. — Philippe Petit

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations. — Michael Haneke

With today's fast films, you can light the way your eye sees the scene. You can abuse the film and create subtleties in contrast with light and exposure, diffusion and filters. That's what makes it an art. — Conrad Hall

So called art films. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films "reality". — Haruki Murakami

One of my favorite films is 'Late Spring' by Yasujiro Ozu. To me, it represents film as art. — Michael Arndt

Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them. — David Foster Wallace

There was a year between school and getting going as an actor when I basically just watched films. Video shops were the new thing, and there was a good one round the corner and me and my brother just watched everything, from the horror to the European art-house. — Aidan Gillen

What smells strongly of crap to one generation - Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies - so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene. — Michael Chabon

I loved the idea of the fact that the way, like I said, they colored outside of the lines. You know, there was rules that they didn't have to follow. And you got -you got - you could get more of a sensational thrill, all right, with some of these exploitation movies or art films, or you could get something you wouldn't see at the normal cineplex. — Quentin Tarantino

As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making. — Harold Ramis

If 'formulaic' is somebody who is unlikely to succeed starting down a process and succeeding - then isn't that what most films are about? And art films are about people who aren't likely to succeed and then don't succeed. — Ridley Scott

I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they're always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, 'We're going to break all the laws of physics.' ... Most people don't realize it, but the series of films which have made more money than any other series of films in the history of the universe is the James Bond series. They're all science fiction, too - romantic, adventurous, frivolous, fantastic science fiction! — Ray Bradbury

When I was coming up with the Hal Hartley films, I was cast as a no one. I had no name visibility. I was working at a downtown post-performance-art, avant garde theater company and doing a couple things on television. But I was a total unknown. — Martin Donovan

I was born into a world full of 'specialists'. I'm not sure whether it's the result of our education system or just natural entropy, but it's very uncommon to know a poet with even a mediocre knowledge about art, or an artist with a good taste in poetry, and so on and on. What this really is: lack of general education in a structural sense: god knows how many people I've met that are actually PROUD about proclaiming their ignorance about another field: it is as if it signifies their 'devotion to one path' while in reality they really only look like a buffoon if you ask me. New is that I am encountering 'Literary Critics' that proudly proclaim to 'never have read any foreign poetry' as if a 'movie critic' that only has watched Dutch films would be somehow capable of criticizing them in any true sense of the word. — Martijn Benders

She loves filming and taking photographs. I can imagine her making beautiful films in France or India or somewhere with a gorgeously colourful culture. She somehow reminds me of my favourite place in the world, she and Paris I can romanticize and immortalize in ceaseless poetry for the rest of my life. — Moonshine Noire

My favorite books, art pieces, films, and music, always have something jarring about them. — Pink

Unlike with any other art form, filmmakers have this unique web of festivals. There are hundreds. It is a democratic system in which you submit films, and if they are good enough, they play. The only barrier to entry is the submission fee. — Jason Reitman

There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do. — Wes Craven

We had forgotten the art of using silence to convey emotions in our films and that's what you seem to have mastered. You've used silence to great advantage in the film. It's brilliant. — Amitabh Bachchan

When I was a teenager, my dad watched my films and told me I could go to art college and study animation. He made me see that I could do this for a living. — Nick Park

I wanted to know what exactly martial arts is. When you look at martial arts films, the later ones became more and more exaggerated. It's like, wow, is martial arts only a show? — Wong Kar-Wai

When I was sixteen and knew nothing about art, I sat through almost six hours of Andy Warhol's Empire. I did not understand it but thought: this is in a major museum, it must be important, what is going on here? I stayed until the museum closed. His Screen Test films are some of my favorite works made this century, but you need to give them back the time they took to be made. — Uta Barth

I'm an eclectic and avid filmgoer. I try to see everything from romantic comedies to blockbusters to art house films, world cinema and documentaries. — Pamela Yates

I make my films because I'm affected by a situation, by something that makes me want to reflect on it, that lends itself to an artistic reflection. I always aim to look directly at what I'm dealing with. I think it's a task of dramatic art to confront us with things that in the entertainment industry are usually swept under the rug. — Michael Haneke

All great films are a resolution of a conflict between darkness and light. There is no single right way to express yourself. There are infinite possibilities for the use of light with shadows and colors. The decisions you make about composition, movement and the countless combinations of these and other variables is what makes it an art. — Vittorio Storaro

I know from my own experience that great films and great actors can have a really big influence on you. There is a place for art in the world, and if you're lucky enough to be good at something and to keep being given work, it's not such a bad thing. — Sally Hawkins

Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die. — Francois Truffaut

The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films. — Agnes Varda

It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart. — David Gilmour

I'm very happy to be a part of a very successful piece of art, as the 'Saw' films have been. One gets into this to participate. It's the coming together of a good story. So, that aspect of it has been just splendid. It really has nothing to do with me or my popularity. I'm fascinated. — Tobin Bell

I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films. — Hassan Blasim

Tribeca Film Festival Doha will promote Middle Eastern themes and filmmakers, but not exclusively. Approximately 40 films will be presented at the new Museum of Islamic Art and in cinemas across Doha. Innovative work by established filmmakers will be shown alongside the debuts of newly discovered directing talents. — Craig Hatkoff

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation. — Louise Brooks

I wouldn't be doing motherfu**ing films for almost three decades if every time I did something that someone didn't like I went in a fu**ing cocoon and just hid there and didn't make my art. — Spike Lee

I remember the university as being very encouraging, especially to experimentation. I think you always get a lot of musicians in any art community, and it seemed like a lot of people I knew worked on films that got made locally. — Neil Farber

Because many of the films I've made have had an intellectualedge, it's harder for me to lie. It's harder for me to go to peoplewith money and say I don't care about art, all I care about iscommerce; all I really want to do is make money. — Paul Schrader

It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism
Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete
opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction. — Igor Stravinsky

The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject. — James Gray

People talk about making art films - experimental films. I can make an art film every day of the week. Nothing to it. What's difficult is to combine a commercial film with art. — Carlo Ponti

Cinema is a wonderful art form for talking about loneliness. We can experience films together with other people. It can be a collective experience of loneliness. We're alone in the dark of the theater, but with other people. — Joachim Trier

Don't ever for a minute make the mistake of looking down your nose at westerns. They're art - the good ones, I mean. They deal in life and sudden death and primitive struggle, and with the basic emotions - love, hate, and anger - thrown in. We'll have westerns films as long as the cameras keep turning. The fascination that the Old West has will never die. And as long as people want to pay money to see me act, I'll keep on making westerns until the day I die. — John Wayne

People gravitate occasionally to the brilliantly made art low budget films, which is maybe one out of every five hundred low budget films made. — Roger Corman

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

When I was young, I saw a lot of martial arts films with Jet Li, Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. I loved them. They are my heroes but, I'm so powerful, I'm so faster. I'm so young and so handsome like a model. I really loved them so they are my role models. — Rain

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. — T.C. Boyle

I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it. — Peter Greenaway

MANY MANAGE TO SEPARATE THEIR LIFE FROM THEIR FILMS. THEY LIVE ONE WAY AND EXPRESS OTHER IDEAS IN THEIR WORKS. THEY ARE ABLE TO SPLIT THEIR CONSCIENCE. I CAN'T. TO ME CINEMA IS NOT JUST MY JOB: IT'S MY LIFE, AND EACH FILM IS AN ACT OF MY LIFE. — Andrei Tarkovsky

Undeniably the American art form, too. And yet more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example. And sometimes trash it completely. — Charlton Heston

I think bad movies are made around the world, not just in Hollywood. There are as many bad art films in the whole world as there are bad commercial films. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I think the art film, or the auteur-driven film - and not only foreign, but domestic films following that path - can get a small share of the box office. And I think that small share may open up a little bit. — Roger Corman

I'll watch anything, from action to art films. — Nathaniel Philbrick

Roman Polanski is a man who cares deeply about his art and its place in this world. What happened to him on his incredible path is filled with tragedy, and most men would have collapsed. Instead, he became a great artist and continues to make great films. — Harvey Weinstein

Independent film is almost nonexistent right now, because all the distributers that used to love to put out these little art films are all out of business right now, because it costs so much to open a movie. — Ron Perlman

Each film has its processes. It doesn't mean that all animated films have to be like "Boy and the World," but creators have to have total freedom. There are films that are born with the purpose to sell. They are still admirable films with great artists and great visuals, but we wanted to use a more radical approach to create art. That's what we tried to do. — Alex Abreu

The demarcation between an art house film and an entertainer has blurred, only because a larger section of the audience has accepted such realistic films. — Arjun Rampal

I always question if somebody else is going to love my films. I think that's what art is about - it's so individual. — Lee Daniels

The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds. — Lee Hall

I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell. — Ira Sachs

There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning. — Andy Milonakis

That's one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing's real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection - none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it's not much help to Truffaut. — Woody Allen

You see, Suzanne, history lectures bore me, art films bore me, your friends bore me, and, if you want to know the truth, I guess you bore me too. — Francine Pascal

It is my first preference to do films with social significance. Art cinema has given me credibility and status as an actor, but commercial cinema has given me a comfortable living. — Om Puri

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new film, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. — Jim Jarmusch

I don't believe in misconceptions in art and films. There are always so many different ways to relate to or understand a film. I love films that give a great amount of space to the audience to explore or be active with what the film is saying. — Claudia Llosa

We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden. — Naomi Wolf

I think the point of art is to be controversial in a lot of ways. It's to cause conversations, and it's to get people excited about and talking about the things that the films are about. — Eloise Mumford

I try to express in my films things that no other art can approach. In my monster films for example, I use special effects in the same way one would use a special film stock, a special camera, and so on. Monster films permit me to use all of these elements at the same time. They are the most visual kind of film. — Ishiro Honda

Though games were barely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression, let alone a legitimate art form, Tom was convinced that they were almost sublime forms of communication, just as films or novels. After — David Kushner

I always argued against the auteur theory; films are a collaborative art form. I've had some fantastically good people help me make the movies. — Alan Parker

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. — Susan Sontag

I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film. — David Cronenberg

Art is a social object, books and films and records and television shows, they're social objects that bring people together in conversation. I love the notion that I could write something that two people could share. That's the goal. — Graham Moore

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand. — Chloe Thurlow

You create a work of art. You do not know whether it will get public sanction. Sometimes outstanding films do no business, and sometimes films which are not so good work. — Dev Anand

I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art. — William Monahan

8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life. — John Fowles

I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something. — Michael Haneke

Then in college, besides economics, I also majored in studio art and got involved in photography and making short films and acting. But I didn't know you could make a living that way. — Brit Marling

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

Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form. — Peter Weir

I was always a performing arts kid in general - but I felt like my ultimate goal was to be an actress and be in films. — Mary Elizabeth Winstead

[on what interests him as a moviegoer] I'm interested in seeing films that confront me with new things, with films that make me question myself, with films that help me to reflect on subjects that I hadn't thought about before, films that help me progress and advance. Those are the kinds of films that interest me. For me, personally, I think watching a movie that simply confirms my feelings is a waste of time. That applies not only to movies, but also to books and every form of art. — Michael Haneke

I tried to grow up. Honest. Didn't quite happen. I guess I'm someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but we'll see. — Donald Fagen

I was never that kid who grew up in New York and was always at the arthouse watching important films. I was the kid who grew up in the Midwest where there weren't any art films, and I watched TV. And that was really the medium that affected me and that I fell in love with. — Shawn Ryan

That is the thing about films. They don't change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different. — Dana Spiotta

Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower. — Ryan Kavanaugh