The Hours Film Quotes & Sayings

[ The Finest Hours] reminded me a lot of a film I did called Unstoppable in that you have a driving thriller aspect of the film and it's not all that complicated of a story and there's a simple elegance to it. I liked that. It is also driven by a really strong romance and ordinary men doing extraordinary things. I love that. — Chris Pine

Anyone who shows up for a midnight opening-night screening of the latest, shiniest geek flick must be a diehard nerd. I mean, you'd have to be a killer-huge fan to wait in line for hours for the newest Star Wars or Marvel Universe film, right? — Sam Maggs

There's a scene [in the 1990 film Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael] in my bedroom where I start eating Almond Roca. I was so young. It was before I knew the tricks of moviemaking, and I didn't know you shoot a lot of different angles. I gobbled them and didn't realize I had to keep doing it. So I had to eat 64 Almond Roca that day. I got so sick. In the beginning you're like, 'Ooh, that looks good.' But hours later, no. — Winona Ryder

You can film me 24 hours a day and you'll get a very accurate picture of who I am. You see the funny side, I work hard, and I try to be honest and just call it how it is. — Lisa Vanderpump

The truth is, working on single camera, show or film, you have no life. You work 60-80 hours a week. You're up before your kid gets up, and you're home when they go to sleep. — Jaime Pressly

My driver Kellie Frost and I would race these fellows home and they were always faster on the highway. We did the same with Daniel and his driver, and thus began a long series of jokes and competitions to alleviate the impossible hours and tensions this film provoked. — Madeleine Stowe

And, for any performer, to be able to go deep into character is fantastic. In film you only get to do that if you're the leading character. But in television you get 18 hours to really test the audience and take them to the edge of how far they will go with this character. I can step over this line and I love that. — Cillian Murphy

Well, I don't know anything about television. I'd never done it before. Initially, it was quite daunting to take on so much challenge and so much time with it. I think it is a great outlet for an actress because you really have 13 hours to bring a character to life, which is so much more than with film, and you have the luxury of time to tell a story and to really color a character. — Diane Kruger

Coaches have the worst hours in the world. They go home maybe twice a week. They're sleeping in their office. They're watching film. It's a brutal, brutal job and that's why I respect them so much. — Eli Manning

Suddenly exhausted, she closes her eyes and slips into nightmares again. Graveyards rising out of the ocean. Her friends' corpses in the light of their burning school. Skeletons ripping open men's chests and crawling inside. She endures it patiently, waiting for the horror film to end and the theater to go dark, those precious few hours of blackout that are her only respite. — Isaac Marion

I live myself with my cat Pebbles. She isn't enjoying the attention as much as me - she ran off up the stairs as soon as the film crew for the show came into the house. She didn't come down for hours. But I have the support of all my brothers and sisters and my neighbours and friends - everyone thinks it's just great. — Susan Boyle

I don't watch anything. I work so much. If I see a film, it's usually that I'll go in after working 15 hours and slam in The Bridge on the River Kwai or something. — William Monahan

I like movies! No, I like theater too. And paintings are great, and all of that! But to me, the great sort of artistic medium I think, of our time, is film. I really feel that. I mean to me, there's nothing else out there, where I can sort of suspend disbelief for two hours. — Leonardo DiCaprio

In 1982, fellow film student Amanda Richardson and I went to Greenham Common for the day - to see what was going on and to shoot some video. The day turned into a weekend, the weekend into seven months, and the dozens of hours of footage turned into a film - 'Carry Greenham Home.' — Beeban Kidron

I acted in theater and I took film classes when I was 12 and just obsessed over it. I loved it and spent hours and hours in the film studio learning and watching. — Mary Elizabeth Winstead

One of the things I love about the theater is that no one can tell you to stop. Once you're onstage, it's three hours, and whether you're completely off or you're just horrendous, you've got to find a way to leave an impression. There's not that terrible thing that you get when you're making a movie, where you get in your car at the end of the day knowing that something you're not proud of was immortalized on film, and you can't fix it because they won't reshoot it. — Carey Mulligan

Film is drama. You've only two hours, so you lie by exclusion, and try to make up for it by portraying the environment. — Shekhar Kapur

It's a difficult thing when you try and make a film of a book that you really love. You have about two hours to tell the story, and it's never going to be enough. — Keira Knightley

At one A.M. we are learning over a bar, Jim and I, and I am stressing the primary importance of the wish. Not knowing what we want, not wishing for it , keeps us navigating along peripheries and tributaries formed and shaped by external influences. I said: Forget about the probable and improbable. Just a few hours ago I met Shirley Clark. She had no money at all but wanted to go to India. She is a film maker. The wish was the orientation. When an offer came to make a film about French children for UNESCO, she accepted, and it led to her being asked to make film on an Indian dancer. Her wish, for years, was the beacon. The probable and improbable are only negative concepts we have to transcend, not accept. — Anais Nin

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters. — Dino De Laurentiis

I like it when I go into a cinema and I'm not aware that I'm there; I'm totally involved in the film for two hours. — Atticus Ross

I never dreamed that shooting a film would be so hard. There was less regulation then of child actors' hours. Even the concept of acting confused me. — Tatum O'Neal

Then, there on the screen I saw Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. An American Tragedy, a film I'd seen at least twice, not that it was all that great, but still it was very good, especially the final scene, which was unreeling at this particular moment: Clift and Taylor standing together, separated by the bars of a prison cell, a death cell, for Clift is only hours away from execution. Clift, already a poetic ghost inside his grey death-clothes, and Taylor, nineteen and ravishing, sublimely fresh as lilac after rain. — Truman Capote

I did every odd job you could possibly imagine: Holding a sign in the rain for 14 hours straight, sweeping up cigarette butts, pouring coffee, running around - anything I could to be on a film set. I wanted to be in the business. So I'd say, 'You need that job done? Fine,' and I became indispensable to people. — Michelle MacLaren

Acting gives you cosmic permission to take a trip in movies that lasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until the film is finished. — Scott Glenn

I feel like I'm in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank empty canvas. And in a way I am. Except that i'm not struggling. I'm Hector Kipling. I might be getting up at all hours of the night to look at my big, blank, empty canvas, but I am not fucking struggling. — David Thewlis

The other main difference between film and television is that you have the opportunity to flush out a character, over a longer period of time. Whereas with a film, you're confined to two or three hours, or whatever it may be. — Elijah Wood

I don't see any difference in the craft of acting, in film or television. It's absolutely the same. It's different storytelling, playing a character over multiple hours, as opposed to two. — David Duchovny

I remember the first film I did, the lead actor would, in between scenes, be reading a newspaper or sleeping and I'd think, 'How can you do that?' But it's so exhausting, you can't be 'on' 12-14 hours a day. — Cate Blanchett

When we shoot 24, there are so many things I have to worry about, from the script to technical things to my performance, that I don't have a second to be bored or take anything for granted. We produce 24 hours of film a season, which is like making 12 movies. — Kiefer Sutherland

People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness, and he'd walk out or fall asleep. — Paul Verhoeven

I think my first love is film. There's something about the span of it and the completion of the experience. You sit down for two hours, in the dark, and you go somewhere else, and then you come back, having completed a journey. — Jon Spaihts

Every once in a while you definitely have to film someone for half an hour saying something that you do not think is funny because for the previous two hours they said a bunch of stuff that you think is really funny. — Seth Rogen

With television you are producing hours and hours of music and for film it is a shorter experience for both the audience and for you as a composer. — Bear McCreary

Our film [Hide and seek ]was created as part of the Asian American Film Lab's 11th 72 Hour Film Shootout filmmaking competition, where filmmaking teams have just 72 hours to conceive, write, shoot, edit and submit a film based on a common theme. The winners were announced during the 38th Asian American International Film Festival in New York last July. The theme for 2015 was 'Two Faces' and was part of a larger more general theme of 'Beauty'. — Garth Kravits

Theatre is organic, film is not. Theatre you come every day and you work with a group of people and you're are all up for it and you all get to do the whole thing every night, be it two hours or three hours. In film you work in two or three minute bits and it's never in chronological order and then someone takes that away and makes it look like it all happened, or that you gave that performance. — Kevin Spacey

When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad. — Ken Burns

Tell you what, if there were gays in the army 'Saving Private Ryan' would have been a hell of a lot shorter film. There is no way it would take gay men three hours to find Matt Damon. — Adam Hills

They needed a date. They had been saying that for months. He would give her a date. He imagined grandiose affairs with fine clothes and elaborate food in luxurious surroundings. A film of her choice or a couple hours in a bookstore would have suited her, and him. This weekend would pass like all the others. Time would steadily work its way past them. Monday would bring another airplane. — John T. Sonne

You could remember the sensual observations that made that day reality, and you could delude yourself into thinking - almost - that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run - and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow. — Sylvia Plath

It's a big responsibility to be the main part of a film because if you don't like me, you have a problem for two-and-a-half hours. — Carice Van Houten

There is no way I could have played fourteen years in the NFL if I didn't work my butt off on the practice field perfecting my technique or spend hours upon hours in the film room studying defenses. — Donald Driver

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas. — Jane Campion

That would be getting up at 5 am ... I don't understand why film's shoot such brutal hours. I think it'd be worth it to not be so strictly cost-effective and have an 8 hour day. The film's would benefit in the end. — Terry Zwigoff

I love escaping into film, because everyday life I find quite troublesome. So any excuse to go into a cinema and say goodbye to the world for a couple of hours, or in a book or whatever, is great. — Alison Goldfrapp

The only time I felt a little too exposed was for a week then I started life-streaming for a couple of hours a day on Qik and Ustream. It became very much like the film 'We Live in Public.' — Jason Calacanis

I never get tired of looking at her [Catherine Keener] and it always surprises me, despite how many hours of film I've shot on that face. She's fantastic. She does comedy and tragedy so equally well. She wears her feeling so on the surface for both. I try to stop myself from casting her but I just keep coming back to her. She's just so fantastic to work with. — Nicole Holofcener

I'll go to do a shoot, I'll spend five or six hours at the beach with people, and when people think I'm all out of film, then they really relax and I get my good pictures. — Jock Sturges

We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments. — Joshua Leonard

You try to do as much as you can on set because practical looks cool and practical looks great. Until you get to a point where the reality is you look at it - and I went through this in my last movie which was a war film, which my brother fought in Iraq and I did a ton of research and as much as I could made it documentary-like - and then at some point on set, the reality is somebody says to you, "You know, you can use a real squib and you can have three hours of clean up and you can lose five shots or we can do that blood explosion in post and you can get those five extra shots." — Kimberly Peirce

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. — Norman Mailer

Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story. — Gayle Forman

There tends to be this hierarchy of film and television, and theater is somewhere else in its own milieu. However, as actors, yes, we love to do theater because it's our story. Nobody can edit it, the curtain goes up, and it's ours for two hours or three, or whatever. And we tell it. — Tim DeKay

He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from the blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down. — Michael Chabon

What's great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence. — Daniel Dae Kim

The idea of Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Dracula, all I could think of was, why haven't they done this with him before? It's such a genius idea. 'Dracula' has always been done as film, so it's been an hour and 40 minutes. What we're done is 10 hours of 'Dracula,' so you have a lot of freedom with all the different mythologies and nuances. — Victoria Smurfit

Television is what we call the long form of storytelling, where we tell stories over thirteen, twenty-two, or twenty-four hours. Miniseries is an eight-hour form of storytelling, and film is a two-hour form. Each and every one of them are important to me, because they're a different modality of storytelling. — Grant Bowler

I would direct TV. That's a little different. It's more of a contained world as a director. When you're doing a film you get on the rollercoaster, you put the safety bar down and then you're gone. And it's hard. It's hard, too, as a parent, I think, because the hours are so long. It's hard. — Cheryl Hines

Ah, 'Pather Panchali' was the most inspiring film that I wrote music for, and it was so spontaneously done. I saw the film, composed on the spot, along with myself and only four other musicians, and everything was done within 4-1/2 hours, I think an all-time record anywhere. — Ravi Shankar

One of the challenges assembling the film was that gun fight went on for three and a half hours and we obviously couldn't spend three and a half hours of the film with one gun fight. It was trying to figure out the balance of how much an audience could take before they either became repulsed or desensitized or bored or just overwhelmed. — Peter Berg

Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them. — Roger Ebert

The grey wall to the right of me had my unfocused eyes attention. The blandness of all four walls and the concrete flooring created a backdrop for my imagination to run wild. Like a blink screen just waiting for a film to start, this bare and depressingly dreary decor did wonderful things for my illusions. I could lay for hours on the floor, staring at seemingly nothing while my mind whirled in a secret place where my reality could not encroach. I'd spend days on end imagining an eleven Kingdom with purple trees and sparkling sapphire oceans. Where I was a guardian of the kingdom, strong and fearless, fighting mythical creatures and villainous traitors. I received adoration from the civilians I was protecting and gratitude from royalty. In this place I was everything I wasn't in the reality. In this place I was wanted. In this place I was alive. — Roxanne Lee

My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that. — Henry Selick

The music is an important and crucial part to an animated film. You don't think about it, but you can watch Tom and Jerry with no words, for hours, and the music dictates the emotion and where the story is going and how you're supposed to feel. Everything is in the music. — Rihanna

The normal cut in a theatrical film is anywhere from 3 to 6 seconds. That means thousands of images in a film over a couple of hours. In Visitors the cuts come every 70-plus seconds. The point of view is that the stiller one can be the more open to their senses they become. The whole world is quick right now. If things can be slowed down they stay in memory longer. — Godfrey Reggio

With two hours until her mother picked her up, Janey was alone, woozy and heart-swollen in the downtown, wandering wet streets that gleamed as you would have them gleam in the sweet summer film of your life. — Wells Tower

film crew up there, enraptured by the charming rodents. The crew had come to shoot a documentary about the massacre; they had expected teen angst and American social Darwinism. They were seduced by the tranquillity - less than a hundred yards from the school. They shot hours of footage of the twelve-inch prairie dogs. The Japanese crew saw this place somewhat differently than Americans did. Their depiction was by turns tumultuous, brutal, explosive, and serene. — Dave Cullen

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from. — David Foster Wallace

I will always love film, the romance of film, sitting in the darkened room with strangers and watching a story for two hours - that will always remain and never be eroded by television. — Cillian Murphy

Film is cool because it's an hour and a half to two hours. It's a great ride. It's typically three acts - beginning, middle and end. It's going on an adventure and by the end it's all cleaned up. — Chris Pratt

To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. — V.S. Naipaul

TV is such a success nowadays because it gives back in a way that features can't. If you go to a film, you only get two hours of great storytellers and performers, and you pay top dollar for that. If you're subscribing to premium channels and you're getting all of these amazing TV shows, and you're watching them as you want, where you want, when you want, on what you want, I think that is the "the golden era of TV" in what television shows are offering to audiences. We're giving them a lot more. It's quality. — Milo Ventimiglia