Quotes & Sayings About Motion Pictures

Even under more ingratiating conditions than rocket travel, this new conquest has already disclosed drawbacks quite as remarkable as its advantages. On a transcontinental flight by a jet plane approaching super-sonic speed, the actual trip is so cramped, so dull, so vacuous, that the only attraction the air lines dare to offer are those vulgar experiences one can have by walking to the nearest cabaret, restaurant, or cinema: liquor, food, motion pictures, luscious stewardesses. Only a lurking sense of fear and the possibility of a grisly death help restore the sense of reality. — Lewis Mumford

Filmmakers began to experiment with special effects almost as soon as motion pictures were invented. The history of special effects is the history of motion pictures. — Ben Burtt

Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work. — Ray Bradbury

I've always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera. — Evelyn Waugh

By and large, the making of motion pictures is all about, 'Let's ratchet it up.' And I always think, 'We don't need to ratchet this up.' If you do, don't call it 'Captain Phillips' or 'The Maersk Alabama.' Call it something else, and then you have carte blanche to do anything, down to sea serpents and aliens. — Tom Hanks

Then that did very well at the box office, so before you knew it, we were in a string of feature motion pictures. Then they announced that they were going to do some spinoffs of us. — George Takei

H. L. Mencken called it "the one authentic rectum of civilization," but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic. In 1927, the iconic sign on the hillside above the city actually said HOLLYWOODLAND. It had been erected in 1923 to advertise a real estate development and had nothing to do with motion pictures. The letters, each over forty feet high, were in those days also traced out with electric lights. (The LAND was removed in 1949.) — Bill Bryson

For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all. — John F. Kennedy

I have two different categories of favorite films. One is the emotional favorites, which means these are generally films that I saw when I was a kid; anything you see in your formative years is more powerful, because it really stays with you forever. The second category is films that I saw while I was learning the craft of motion pictures. — John Carpenter

Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making - and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay. — Raymond Chandler

John Ottman's music has emerged ... as a brilliant new sound in the spectrum of Motion Pictures. — John Badham

I've always tried to be aware of what I say in my films, because all of us who make motion pictures are teachers - teachers with very loud voices. — George Lucas

He promised to write a book later about the trip. He sold the rights to the motion pictures and still photographs that would be taken, and he agreed to give a long lecture series on his return. In all these arrangments, there was one basic assumption - that Shackleton would survive. — Alfred Lansing

Slowly and gently, Augustus Brine explained to the king of the Djinn about the illusion created by motion pictures. When he finished, he felt like he had just raped the tooth fairy in front of a class of kindergartners. — Christopher Moore

I made my last motion picture in March 1965 for Magna Pictures. 'Harlow,' based on the life of actress Jean Harlow ... I didn't know at the time that 'Harlow' would be my last motion picture. — Ginger Rogers

We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life. — Theodore Dreiser

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice ... it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous ... — J. Michael Straczynski

Take it where you can find it, in old photograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. — Ray Bradbury

I began my career creating art for an animated feature film, and it has been a life-long dream to tell some of the story of my own life - the story behind my art - through the medium of motion pictures. — Thomas Kinkade

I've done my bit for motion pictures-I've stopped making them. — Liberace

But I can't help but long for a real return to the Western. Westerns are true Americana. They tell of the struggles of our ancestors who came West seeking new homes, new ways of living, freedom and the promise of a bright future. The story of the West is inspiring and terrible, idealistic and bloody, sublime and atrocious. It embodies this country's best and worst characteristics. The good parts of the story inspire us. The bad parts warn us of what we have to do to make things better. Even though many Western films have only a slight connection to the true history of the West, I believe exposure to these motion pictures can stimulate kids to learn more about what their forefathers endured to make the United States one nation, from sea to shining sea. — Clayton Moore

It sort of filtered into their subconscious through motion pictures, but it's an historical secret. This - whatever this is - needs to be studied and, in a kind of definitive way, talked about. — Dwight Schultz

I love doing motion pictures and expect to be as busy as I want to be in them. — Jeffrey Hunter

Togetherness, for me, means teamwork. In my business of motion pictures and television entertainment, many minds and skillful hands must collaborate ... T he work seeks to comprehend the spiritual and material needs and yearnings of gregarious humanity. It makes us reflect how completely dependent we are upon one another in our social and commercial life. — Walt Disney

The mission of the media is to reflect the community to itself, to give the people a vision of who they are, what they're doing, what they want, what they need. I think motion pictures have been an incredible gift to humanity. I can't imagine living in a world without them. — Dolores Hart

Lars is played by Ryan Gosling, the Prince of Tics, whose idea of acting is to wait a few beats before reacting to other people's remarks, as if acting were merely a matter of adhering to the seven-second delay rule. Jack Nicholson has made a career out of doing this sort of thing, as did Paul Newman, as did Marlon Brando (who the other two learned it from), but they didn't do it all the time and they were more fun to look at ... Lars And The Real Girl joins a number of other recent films in the category of motion pictures where the director doesn't know that his protagonist is unsympathetic. — Joe Queenan

I am absolutely ecstatic about it, ... To say you are one of the 50 favorite villains and one of the 50 favorite heroes in the history of American motion pictures, that is unbelievable, and I felt very honored. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

The term sci-fi, which most science fiction writers loathe, I will reserve for those motion pictures that claim to be science fiction but are actually based on comic strips. Or worse. — Ben Bova

I was always one of those people who would watch the Super Bowl as much for the sports as I did for the ads. I was always just sort of fascinated by the fact that when you turn on the TV, there was motion, there was moving pictures on it. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

I see the experience of pictures as a kind of cycle, a kind of circular motion in which you're in the world, then you enter the picture and you're in a different world (it's not the same as the one you live in, but recognizable as one you might live in). And then you're returned to your world with an enlarged sense of its possibilities. — Frank Gohlke

I would like to say, for the record, that I am in favor of using more American Indians and other minorities in motion pictures, I am against polluting the oceans of the world, I am for every nationality having its own homeland, I am against whacking baby seals on the head, and I am for saving the whales. — Johnny Carson

Pace begins in the screenplay. Cliche or not, we must control rhythm and tempo. It needn't be a symmetrical swelling of activity and shaving of scene lengths, but progressions must be shaped. For if we don't, the film editor will. And if to trim our sloppy work he cuts some of our favorite moments, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We're screenwriters, not refugees from the novel. Cinema is a unique art form. The screenwriter must master the aesthetics of motion pictures and create a screenplay that prepares the way for the artists who follow. — Robert McKee

To me, cinema is not a movie or a TV screen, and it's not a seat in a building versus one in your living room. It's the art of motion pictures. — Ted Sarandos

I wouldn't give a dime for all the possibilities of [motion pictures with sound]. The public will never accept it. — George Eastman

The Cosmic Director has written His own plays, and assembled the tremendous casts for the pageant of the centuries. From the dark booth of eternity, He pours His creative beam through the films of successive ages, and the pictures are thrown on the screen of space. Just as the motion-picture images appear to be real, but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusive seeming. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture, temporarily true to five sense perceptions as the scenes are cast on the screen of man's consciousness by the infinite creative beam. — Paramahansa Yogananda

In motion pictures, the actor rules. The camera served the actor. — Richard Donner

The success I have achieved in bodybuilding, motion pictures, and business would not have been possible without the generosity of the American people and the freedom here to pursue your dreams. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Mother of three; divorcee; American. Twenty years experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumour would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. (Has had Broadway). References upon request. — Bette Davis

I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. — Walt Disney

The coming of the motion picture was as important as that of the printing press. — William Randolph Hearst

Nations need to constantly reaffirm their historical roots to maintain their political ideals. Motion pictures were one of the media used by nations to accommplish this task. The question one must ask is: Did the colonial films made faithfully represent the period in our nation's history? — John P. Harty Jr.

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it. — Yasunari Kawabata

Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century - they combine Art and business! — Roger Corman

I wonder whether certain dreadful events, of the sort this picture is full of, are not so incalculably rich in the possibilities of moral and aesthetic blackmail that they can never be represented maturely or even un-deceitfully, and so had better not be represented at all...Indeed, few films ever made have so vigorously seized the spectator by the throat and so implacably insisted, with one unprincipled bang over the head after another, that he turn himself into the wildest animal possible, and mistrust and hate with all his might any lingering question which troubles him about his obligations to do so. — James Agee

I get tired of singing to the guys I beat up in motion pictures. — Elvis Presley

All statistics consist of our attempts to represent statistically what is in motion; and in the process things assume a weight in our mind which they have not in reality. For this reason a man, who by his profession is concerned with any particular aspect of life, is apt to magnify its proportions; in laying undue stress upon facts he loses his hold upon truth. A detective may have the opportunity of studying crimes in detail, but he loses his sense of their relative places in the whole social economy. When science collects facts to illustrate the struggle for existence that is going on in the kingdom of life, it raises a picture in our minds of "nature red in tooth and claw." But in these mental pictures we give a fixity to colours and forms which are really evanescent. — Rabindranath Tagore

The Jews are one of the principle forces attempting to lead the U.S. into the war. The Jews greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government. I am saying that the LEADERS of the Jewish race wish to involve us in the war for reasons that are NOT AMERICAN. — Charles Lindbergh

If you take the '70s with Blaxploitation pictures, there was a proliferation of black-content films and motion pictures, television, stage plays and so forth at a time when Hollywood was in trouble financially, and it was cheaper to do black films to keep the lights on until they could reestablish themselves. — Glynn Turman

It's very difficult to break into motion pictures, but it's oddly easier for directors today because of independent films and cable, who have inherited for the most part those films of substance that the studios are reluctant to finance. — Mark Rydell

If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more. — Gregory Peck

[T]here may be some truth in that if the Arabs have some complaints about my policy towards Israel, they have to realize that the Jews in the U. S. control the entire information and propaganda machine, the large newspapers, the motion pictures, radio and television, and the big companies, and there is a force that we have to take into consideration. — Richard M. Nixon

Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision. — Isaac Newton

I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures and I guess I am committed to it for life. — Clint Eastwood

I thought that it would be easier to learn that if I worked in motion pictures. So I went to work with one motion picture producer who was developing a color system. This didn't do to me much good. All I did was pick filters for the camera. — John Hench

I went around the corner to motion pictures. — Jerry Reed

The term "godawful" should be used sparingly in connection with motion pictures. With Angels & Demons , however, it seems oddly appropriate. Not only does this prequel-turned-sequel to The Da Vinci Code make its predecessor seem like a masterwork of pacing and plotting, but it may represent a nadir for director Ron Howard and is probably the worst instance of acting from star Tom Hanks since back in the days when he was struggling out from under the shadow of Bosom Buddies . — James Berardinelli

If you ever go to a music session, you'll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they're reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures. — Clint Eastwood

I had done 25 motion pictures prior to The Partridge Family and nobody knew my name. — Shirley Jones

I use every single thing that Alfred Hitchcock taught me in my acting career ... I am very grateful for the education he gave me in making motion pictures. — Tippi Hedren

The colonial films of the golden age of Hollywood were a clear proclamation of the Consensus historians' interpretation of the facts. These motion pictures encouraged audiences to believe that our nation could overcome all obstacles to its growth and defend itself against any future foreign aggression. — John P. Harty Jr.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater. — Ray Bradbury

Life is like a motion picture, everything is like a movie. In one of my rhymes I say, "My life is like a movie/Directed by King Louie". — King Louie

Too many Broadway actors in motion pictures lost their grip on success
had a feeling that none of it had ever happened on that sun-drenched coast, that the coast itself did not exist, there was no California. It had dropped away like a hasty dream and nothing could ever have been like the things they thought they remembered. — Mae West

Hollywood's Studio Era was part of a Golden Age because it didn't need profanity (unlike reality-television today) — Manny Pacheco

No, no, it's not in books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into on garment for us. — Ray Bradbury

The greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. — Charles Lindbergh

Mr. Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval - a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old - and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawn mowers. — Bill Bryson

Every industry has standards. For example, the motion picture camera, there are 2 or 3 film formats with a number of brackets and number of speed, a shooting speed that is standard. If we didn't have that, then some motion pictures will play back too slowly, and people would talk very slowly, and it will be bizarre. — Jeffrey Zeldman

I wasn't an actor. They they take the externals. Here I was, a kid thrown into Hollywood with a brand-new name, starring in motion pictures. — Tab Hunter

My films generally center around thousands of pictures being flashed in rapid succession to create the illusion of motion. — Lars Von Trier

You have to be very, very good looking to get ahead in motion pictures. — Elaine Stritch

I feel that classical music should be a more recognizable part of everyone's entertainment. It has been my hope that through live concerts, motion pictures, recordings, international competitions, and interesting public forums, a larger group of people will learn to love classical music and attend live concert performances. — Jose Iturbi

When we got together we would start projects: an alarm clock torn apart and distributed over a wall, a stop-motion video of Lego people having sex, a Web site for pictures of toilets. — Ned Vizzini

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

Lenin in 1921 observed very presciently that motion pictures were the most powerful tool ever invented to shape the way we thought. He was right. Political films can be successful. — Charlton Heston

When I did that first movie, it was the introduction to all the set-up time and the waiting time that's endemic in motion pictures, and the repetition. — Harry Shearer

When you make motion pictures, each picture is a life unto itself. When you finish and the picture is over, there's an understanding, a realization that we'll never be assembled this way again. That these relationships are severed forever and ever. And each of these films is a little life. — John Huston

It's important to remember something: California is not a state built on moderation. We invented motion pictures. We made an electric sports car. We're both the brain (Silicon Valley) and the heart (Hollywood, alas) of this great nation, and meanwhile we grow everyone's strawberries. We're open to innovation. We're open to new ideas. We're open to odd couples - and to strays from all parts of the world. Look at our last governor: an Austrian body builder and son of a Nazi married to John F. Kennedy's niece. Anything can happen. — Scott Hutchins

The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel. — William Monahan

The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment. — Edward Bernays

The thing about a motion picture is that look of film on a big screen takes you into a magical. — Billy Bob Thornton

Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique. — Rod Serling

You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts. — Ray Bradbury

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?' — Zack Snyder

I never had any interest in sitcoms or motion pictures or anything like that. — Norm MacDonald

Westerns are closer to art than anything else in the motion picture business. — John Wayne

Some of our newspapers and magazines are more concerned with the welfare of their advertisers than they are with the dissemination of news and the discussion of matters of lasting importance ... Radio, television, motion pictures, popular books - all contribute ... to ... the stifling of dissent on all but the most banal levels ... a renunciation of the most basic and precious of democratic principles. — J. Paul Getty

Time if the inner form of animal sense that animates events-the still frames-of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a series of still pictures-a series of spatial states-into an order, into the 'current' of life. Motion is created in our minds by running "film cells" together. Remember that everything you perceive-even this page-is actively, repeatedly, being constructed inside your head. It's happening to you right now. Your eyes cannot see through the wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain. If your mind could stop its "motor" for a moment, you'd get a freeze frame, just as the movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momentum. In fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial states. — Robert Lanza

The Academy Awards are passed out on Sunday. It's voted by members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Or as I call them, 50 shades of white. — David Letterman

Recording sessions were stimulating to photograph, because everything was in motion: the subject, the musicians, the technicians and the photographer. You needed fast reflexes to keep up with moving targets, and sensitivity and skill to get the pictures while keeping out of the performers' eyeline so as not to break their concentration. — Eve Arnold

The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second. — Jean-Jacques Annaud

The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made. — Alfred Hitchcock

Hollywood, what a place it is! It is so far away from the rest of the world, so narrow. No one thinks of anything but motion pictures or talks of anything else. — Dolores Del Rio

I always wanted to make motion pictures, ever since I was a wee boy, and I was 32, and time was marching on. I met a guy who said, 'Come out to Hollywood for 10 days, and I'll get you a deal.' So I figured, 'OK, 10 days.' On the 10th day, he got me a development deal with Disney, not for a lot of money, but it allowed me to make the move. — Craig Ferguson

In 1972 Charlie Chaplin was allowed back to America to receive an honorary Oscar, 'for the incalculable he had on making motion pictures the art form of this century'. That's what the Academy was always for - to blur the equation enough so that profit and fame could be called art. — Edward Jay Epstein

That's why I never took this business too seriously, thinking I was something special, when I knew the truly great performers in motion pictures. pictures. — Robert Stack

Castle Rock and New Line each have their strengths, but the great thing about New Line is that they are a real focused-market, niche-market player who understand franchises. They probably understand the franchise business in motion pictures better than anyone else out there. — Fred Seibert

I realized what you could do in motion pictures by surrounding yourself with geniuses. — Richard Donner

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts - figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect. — Sinclair Lewis