Cinematic Quotes & Sayings

Our touchstones of slavery are 'Song of the South,' 'Gone With the Wind' and 'The Birth of a Nation.' It's hard to separate the cinematic quality from the underlying themes. I appreciate the films, but the message was repugnant. — John Ridley

In Hong Kong, particularly, we craft this art for decades. The action choreographer actually is the action director. He takes over and he choreographs with - by himself or with his team, and place the camera where he feels cinematic effect to bring out that choreography. — Donnie Yen

I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way. — Miranda July

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways. — Rose Tremain

We are the memory keepers and the trappers of time; stealers of stolen glances and breathless lungs from all that have been taken away. We are the noticers of subtle signs hidden in plain sight by a benevolent universe bigger than we'd ever believe...We are the directionless wanderers and the destinationless travelers and we are the crumpled map that never got packed to join us. We are the cinematic lovers and the translucent curtains saturated in light. The soundtrack to the moments without sounds and the swiftness that two bodies can become one in the stillness of a second. We, says the last string pulled out, the final string that kept it all together, balled up tight, filling us after all this time, We, are the chasers of the light. — Tyler Knott Gregson

I came to this project and 'Far from Heaven' from completely different vantage points. 'Heaven' was of course about the Douglas Sirk films of that period, with the very specific cinematic language and style of melodrama. With 'Carol,' it was presented to me already packaged, with Cate Blanchett attached and Phyllis Nagy's script complete - when it came to me it had a long history and pre-history. — Todd Haynes

When I go to the cinema, I want to have a cinematic experience. Some people ignore the sound and you end up seeing something you might see on television and it doesn't explore the form. Sound is the other picture. When you show people a rough cut without the sound mix they are often really surprised. Sound creates a completely new world. With dialogue, people say a lot of things they don't mean. I like dialogue when it's used in a way when the body language says the complete opposite. But I love great dialogue I think expositional dialogue is quite crass and not like real life. — Lynne Ramsay

PLAINVILLE WAS A QUAINT picturesque town. Northern California's version of Andy Griffith's Mayberry. Bucolic enough to provide cinematic contrast for any low-budget stalk-and-slash film. Juxtaposition played just as important a role in still photography as it did in cinematography. Maybe that's why Natalie Jones had picked Plainville for her final descent into darkness. The climactic scene in a comedic tragedy. Cast of one. Audience of one. Curtain closed. — Virna DePaul

I draw on a lot of cinematic influences like Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders, artists who let a story take its time. Comics are a visual medium, and visuals should be allowed to tell some of that story. — Jeff Lemire

I'm not going to say that the other people I worked with weren't artist. They were all very great, very talented people, but I think Guillermo [del Toro] will go down in cinematic history as one of our more talented, visually brilliant directors. — Charlie Day

What he's done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It's beautifully realised - it's a beat film. — Tilda Swinton

My litmus test of compatibility is 'Tom Cruise.' I hate people who hate Tom Cruise, cultural automatons who at the mention of his name reflexively bridle and say the diminutive thespian and Theta level Scientoligist is 'crazy' and 'a terrible actor'. They hate him because he's easy to hate. They think that despising Tom Cruise's lack of personality and supposed lack of talent is somehow a blow against the bland American Anschluss of the rest of the planet. Tom Cruise may indeed be the Christopher Columbus of the twentieth century, sent off by the kings of Hollywood to prove the new world of International Box Office isn't flat and to find a direct route into the Asian market, but the decline of everything isn't his fault; he's just a cinematic explorer and a damn fine actor. And hating him doesn't make you seditious- it makes you complicit. — Paul Beatty

The poet's life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We're hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both. — Eileen Myles

I've always approached television from a little more cinematic perspective, if not a much more cinematic perspective because of the shows I have been fortunate enough to work on. — Bear McCreary

Of All the Gin Joints is one part cinematic history, one part old Hollywood weirdness, and one part handy basic bar guide, with a dash of romance and more than a few wry twists. Bailey and Hemingway prove themselves very entertaining cultural mixologists. — Sam Lipsyte

I think for me when you look at the idea of being able to create a limitless world and use it almost as a playground for action and adventure and so forth, I naturally gravitate towards cinematic worlds, whether it's the Bond films and things like that. — Christopher Nolan

What we want Vrse to be is a collection of the best in class - the greatest cinematic VR that you can see, and a place that you can trust. — Chris Milk

I think violence in a cinematic context can be, if handled in a certain way, very seductive. — Kathryn Bigelow

The spy genre is something which, as a fan of movies, a movie geek myself, I just love that cinematic joy that they bring. — Pierce Brosnan

Getting the audience to cry for the Terminator at the end of T2, for me that was the whole purpose of making that film. If you can get the audience to feel emotion for a character that in the previous film you despised utterly and were terrified by, then that's a cinematic arc. — James Cameron

A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur. — V.S. Naipaul

Spike optioned my first book, 'Now the Hell Will Start,' and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dialogue. His feedback taught me so much about how to craft a cinematic narrative. — Brendan I. Koerner

THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism. — Werner Herzog

Even the best documentaries reach tens of thousands in their cinematic window. I believe that by launching online, we could potentially reach millions. — Sam Branson

I don't know what actually goes down in heaven, if heaven has a grand staircase or a theater where you get to see your impact in a "Crash" kind of cinematic adventure, but I do know our stories work that way--the imprints of ourselves we press into the palms of others have the power to be passed and passed through the hands of many. That the smallest things we do, never thinking twice about them, might be the very things that keep a person alive, and breathing, and standing on that day. I've stopped doubting that kind of impact because believing in it - believing in miracles in the mud of the mundane - gives you so much more purpose than not believing in it at all. — Hannah Brencher

For city dwellers like me who don't get to vacation in the summer, no filmmaker can so effectively make you feel like you went to France for August, fell in love, got hurt, broke up, grew up, and figured some things out - all in 90 minutes or so. My favorite of Rohmer's cinematic escapes is 'La Collectionneuse.' — Jake Paltrow

Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on film, such as Man Ray's portrait of the photographer Lee Miller. — Paul Walker

I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way. — Robert Kurson

I chose to tell a personal story. When you tell a movie like this that's as emotionally charged as this is, it's a risk. As one of my great cinematic heroes, Francis Coppola, would say, "If you aren't taking the highest, greatest risk, then why are you a filmmaker?" — Christian Bale

I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow. — John Fowles

There's something about a roller coaster that triggers strong feelings, maybe because most of us associate them with childhood. They're inherently cinematic; the very shape of a coaster, all hills and valleys and sickening helices, evokes a human emotional response. — Diablo Cody

I really think that the 'Jersey Boys' musical - and this is just my opinion - lends itself to being cinematic in some way, because it's a jukebox musical; the characters break into song only for the scene transitions. — Vincent Piazza

I think it[3D] should be used as a new artistic form, not as a gimmick, not to impress you but the existence of an environment that you view as a theatrical dramatic experience is - you don't just have the X-Y axis, you have the Z and that makes a difference. You still have the framing, you still use lenses, so most of the cinematic rules and languages still apply but I think it's a different existence. — Ang Lee

And it's one reason why I don't go to a lot of movies - they're more and more dominated by corporate values and fiscal concerns as opposed to cinematic concerns. — Jeffrey Wright

This was not an Indiana Jones classic holovid; it was real life. — Karen Lord

When we say 'cinematic', we tend to think John Ford and vistas and wide-open spaces. Or we think of kinetic camera movement or of a certain number of cinematic styles, like film noir. — Lenny Abrahamson

Something impacts me emotionally, art is a kind of outlet, and I figure it's the same for a lot of artists. The way my mind deals with things is cinematic. — Ryan Coogler

There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses. — Jonas Mekas

Our music over the years has been very cinematic. It's surprising we never really got into film soundtracks. — Martin Gore

I think sometimes the way to preserve the magic of a book is to throw it away - meaning, not to cling to the way a book does its magic, but to find a cinematic equivalent. — Emma Donoghue

A lot of cinematic influences on 'Descender' - Kubrick for sure. '2001: A Space Odyssey' is my favorite movie. It has been since I was 12. I just love that film. — Jeff Lemire

I've always been fascinated by chefs and the worlds of chefs - what they do is incredibly cinematic. — Jon Favreau

I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic. — Jessica Hagedorn

...we're not even really hiking,
more like meandering in cinematic light. — Kristen Henderson

My cinematic crush has been pretty much the same since I was 12: Kevin Costner. — Emma Watson

I go to a very visual place when I'm singing. It's very cinematic and I get this feeling of space. I love when music does that. — Dave Gahan

Both cinematic culture and the culture at large have changed profoundly. We're now in post-cinematic digital culture, and the internet has obviously usurped movies, which are no longer central to our lives, at least not as a collective spectator experience. — Masha Tupitsyn

Now there's us, staking out our piece of cinematic turf (might be small but
it's ours). And the music has to fit the vision as specifically as it did for [Star Wars and The Matrix.] OUR music comes from THEIR music, this scrappled bunch. It is spare, intimate, mournful and indefatigable. — Joss Whedon

Audiences looking for a rich, textured, cinematic experience will be put off and disconcerted by an image that looks more like an advanced version of high definition television than a traditional movie. — Kenneth Turan

I'm thrilled to continue the tradition of the spectacular, cinematic, horrifying, exciting and emotional storytelling of 'The Walking Dead.' I'm a huge fan of the comics, and started with the show on the other side of the set, as an avid viewer. — Scott M. Gimple

I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft. — David Ives

There is a part of me that likes things that are epic, that's why I think a lot of my songs go to these soundscapes that are cinematic, because I really like the epic storytelling. — Josh Garrels

With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories. — Lucy Walker

I love touring, I love making records, but eventually all I want ... I want to score. I want people to ask me to score their film or use my songs in cinematic ways. I think the ultimate media is a story that you can watch and feel and have a musical moment to. I think it's my favorite. I love watching something when music is creating motion within the motion. — Justin Vernon

Charles Dickens was an incredibly cinematic writer. He wrote this one hundred years before there were movies. He writes very thematically. It is amazing. — Jim Carrey

The British often shy away from any cinematic interpretation of real sex. They sometimes have what I call "subtle sex," which is really introspective and has soft music in the background. Either that or it's played for comedy. The British are kind of hung up about sex. They find it kind of titillating and they make jokes about it because they're nervous. — Steve Coogan

Frank Capra, Hollywood's Horatio Alger, lights with more cinematic know-how and zeal than any other director to convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the 'Saturday Evening Post' covers of Norman Rockwell. 'It's A Wonderful Life,' the latest example of Capracorn, shows his art at a hysterical pitch. — Manny Farber

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can't possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this. — Akira Kurosawa

I can't write a scene unless I've visualized it. Unless I can actually see it, and that's why a lot of reviewers have said my books are very cinematic, because I actually do see them before I write them. — Eric Van Lustbader

I challenged myself to write/direct a romantic comedy. People trash talk the rom com, but it's one of the oldest cinematic genres, with stellar origins like Twentieth Century and Trouble in Paradise. I think as audiences lost their innocence, the genre lost its suspense. To create suspense, you need obstacles, so I gave my couple an obstacle that very few people ever overcome: their own behavior and their past. — Leslye Headland

I'm such a proponent of the theatrical experience and the cinematic experience, and we've reached this point where the magicians are not only giving away their tricks, but they're telling us how they're doing the tricks in advance before you even come to the magic show. It'd be nice to get a little of the mystery back in. — Colin Trevorrow

Ather than Eisenstein's fast and hard cutting, I like to hold the shot very still and for longer than we're accustomed to. For me personally as a viewer, this technique invariably causes me to have waves of emotions that I think arise from a profound form of mindful awareness and the feelings that go along with that. I am frequently brought to tears by this kind of existential cinematic technique. — Jenni Olson

A lot of the commercials that I was doing were very slice-of-life, emotional, documentary-style, not big and cinematic and ultimately like the kind of movie I wanted to make. — Dan Trachtenberg

As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera. — Marshall Brickman

All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn't matter what you call Him just as long as you call. Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusion. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture. One's values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture and that not in, but beyond, lies his own ultimate reality. — George Harrison

Probably 90 percent of the stuff I make has inevitably been done before ... Whether it's playing Hamlet, which has been on the go for 400 years, or pieces from the cinematic world that also have been essayed before, I feel released by that. — Kenneth Branagh

And then, I suppose, there's also a cinematic reality on top of that. Because it was extremely difficult to keep tabs on, it was quite confusing acting that. — Gabriel Byrne

To my mind, any phenomenon is para-cinematic if it shares one element with cinema, e.g. modularity with respect to space or time. — Hollis Frampton

Jabba resembled a giant tadpole, like the cinematic creature for whom he was nicknamed, the man was a hairless spheroid. As resident guardian angel of all NSA computer systems, Jabba marched from department to department, tweaking, soldering, and reaffirming his credo that prevention was the best medicine. No NSA computer had ever been infected under Jabba's reign; he intended to keep it that way. — Dan Brown

I use cinematic things in a theatrical way on stage, and in film I use theatrical techniques in a cinematic way. — Julie Taymor

If I never do another movie, I will have had the privilege of working on one of the big Hollywood movies with top people, creating a world that can only be described as totally cinematic. — Christine Baranski

Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the selection of the subject matterand by his decision as to the exact cinematic instant of exposure, he is blending the variables of interpretation into an emotional whole. — W. Eugene Smith

It is really amazing to be able to do cinematic, big feature style film music on a weekly basis and do it in LA, on a big scoring stage, on a studio lot, and do it with the right players and make it sound great. — Christopher Lennertz

Kill Bill is one of my favorite movies. It has this gritty feeling to it, and it's got a little bit of everything - a little bit of western, a little bit of samurai, and a lot of this very cinematic violence that I personally think is very entertaining. — Tove Styrke

A book and a movie are different animals. You need a cinematic perspective to be involved in the motion pictures. And this is something I lack. — Ashwin Sanghi

When I was developing the [Daredevil] idea, we were really doing something closer to what was in the comic book. By that, I mean in terms of civilians in the street knew that superpowers were an everyday matter of fact. When it finally ended up at Netflix, they really decided to land it in the Marvel Universe that exists in the cinematic universe. That changes the story entirely. It was no longer about the other, which is what that metaphor was. It's really more about the character herself, which I love. — Melissa Rosenberg

I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films. — Khaled Hosseini

Far from being a pack of baying butchers,critics sometimes have a perverse habit of tending to the sick and wounded on the cinematic field of battle, rushing in where angels fear to tread, even when the patient is clearly without a pulse. — Mark Kermode

I suppose the short chapters and differing narrative points of view are quite "cinematic" devices, which came very naturally to me. — Stef Penney

The line from Pulp Fiction - the one Samuel L. Jackson shouts at John Travolta as they're trying to wash blood off their hands - pops into my head: 'I used the same soap you did and when I dried my hands, the towel didn't look like no fuckin' maxi-pad!' I almost - almost - share this most quotable of cinematic quotes with him, when I remember it contains The Word. You know: 'maxi-pad. — Elle Lothlorien

Violence is a form of cinematic entertainment. — Quentin Tarantino

I personally think a fight scene is the most cinematic thing you can witness because all the elements of filmmaking come together, you know, with the camera speed changes, editing, make up effects and general smoke and mirrors of trying to make it look like you are hitting someone when you're not. It's filmmaking in it's purest form, I think. — Scott Adkins

My problem is that whenever I shoot, I do it Bruce Willis "Die Hard" style - in a very cinematic fashion. — Hideo Kojima

Invisible violence in Pakistan, violence against brown people, ongoing violence in Iraq - that's got to be quantified in the same way as the cinematic glamorous violence that happens in recognisable cities. — Russell Brand

There's always changes in the way they do that in the cinematic universe. I think, with the S.H.I.E.L.D. 2.0, you're seeing some of the first ripples of those different points of view on what S.H.I.E.L.D. should be when it's rebuilt. I'm very, very curious to know which side Coulson will end up on in that struggle. — Clark Gregg

Symmetria by the Uccello Project is a gorgeous, instrumental and largely unclassifiable record. Best thought of as 'cinematic', each of the tracks conjures up a range of emotions and images, taking the listener on a beautiful journey. The layers of basses, guitars and percussion ebb and flow, drawing on jazz, folk, blues and African music, blending all the elements into one lovely album. Recommended. — Steve Lawson

I don't make the best movies in the world, but at times, I do feel like I'm adding something to the cinematic community. — Seth Rogen

I am surely a feminist filmmaker, but not because I set out to become one, or am trying to make any kind of statement. Rather, it's inherent in the act of expressing myself, as a woman who is deeply alienated from mainstream cinematic structures of seeing. I express myself and am instantly feminist. — Nina Menkes

Reality's its own thing. And I'm not really into reality that much. I'm into this cinematic stylized reality that can comment on reality. It's like the most beautiful parts of reality and the saddest parts, but it's none of this middle ground. — Zack Snyder

I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic. — Nicholas Royle

Far from the cinematic drama of hospital emergency rooms, Slow Medicine embraces the unsung work of daily attention that is the greatest need and firmest foundation for longevity and quality of life at the farthest reach of age. Excellent chronic care attends to the day-to-day needs and conditions of the patient - by offering emotional support and social stimulation, supplying better nutrition, easing chronic skin and nail conditions, and making sleeping, moving, bathing, dressing, and voiding easier. Slow Medicine is the careful practice that most reliably sustains fragile patterns of well-being. This foundation for better elder care strengthens, rather than replaces, the selective use of high-tech care. During the time of the writing of this book, I have lived the — Dennis Mccullough

I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvelous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a 'cinematic' dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality. — Walter Murch

I began to exercise a lot of cinematic muscle with the precepts I had learned in the New York art world. Film was intriguing. I began to think of art as elitist; film was not. — Kathryn Bigelow

Wanda was one of the sighers and moaners, the omigod-I-never-dreamed-it-could-be-like-this-types. When she wasn't purring with cinematic sincerity, she was a warm and giving bedmate with the full complement of womanly slopes and curves and warm, tender places. Sometime around dawn, she told me I looked like Harrison Ford. Or was it Henry Ford? — Paul Levine

I think in the wake of the domination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, everyone is now looking for a grand plan. — Kenneth Branagh

Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments. — Nora Ephron

One of the challenges was to make a cinematic movie about literally talking heads and to try to make it feel like something you want to see in a theater. — Morgan Neville

'Sweet Valley High' is fantastic, fabulous, a little bit campy, and - dare I say it - cinematic. — Diablo Cody

You have to question a cinematic culture that preaches artistic expression, and yet would support a decision that is clearly a product of a patriarchy-dominant society, which tries to control how women are depicted on screen. The MPAA is okay supporting scenes that portray women in scenarios of sexual torture and violence for entertainment purposes, but they are trying to force us to look away from a scene that shows a woman in a sexual scenario, which is both complicit and complex. It's misogynistic in nature to try and control a woman's sexual presentation of self. — Ryan Gosling

While the storytelling in games is getting so much better, you look at something like Grand Theft Auto V, which I thought was really beautifully written, it doesn't really need a movie because it is a movie. So I think you need a unique game - you either need an incredibly talented writer and director to come in and put together an amazing vision, or you need a game like Metal Gear, which is very cinematic, has a huge amount of history behind it, but whose cinematic experience is very different from what you'd get in a theater. — David Hayter