Best Film Quotes

I've learned from every director I've worked with. Everybody's style is very different, and I always say that being an actor is the best film school that I could ever go to. ~ Lake Bell

I think with a lot of filmmakers, their first film is their best film because they had to think on their feet and solve problems with ingenuity. ~ Peter Dinklage

When you do a film, all you want is to make the best film possible. You don't think about Oscars. But it's really flattering. Please, bring it on! ~ Demian Bichir

The most important thing for Quentin and the most important thing for me is to make the best film possible. ~ Robert Richardson

I am not a bloody ghoda running a race that you give me a tag. I am competitive, and the reason for that is that I want to do the best films. ~ Anushka Sharma

Exactly, I repeated myself. I believe we do it all the time. We always take up certain elements again. How can it be avoided? An actor's voice always has the same timbre and, consequently, he repeats himself. It is the same for a singer, a painter ... There are always certain things that come back, for they are part of one's personality, of one's style. If these things didn't come into play, a personality would be so complex that it would become impossible to identify it.
It is not my intention to repeat myself, but in my work there should certainly be references to what I have done in the past. Say what you will, but The Trial is the best film I ever made ... I have never been so happy as when I made this film.
(talking about directing, The Trial (1962) - from Orson Welles: Interviews (book)) ~ Orson Welles

For me, 'Come and See' is, by a million miles, the best film about war that has ever been made. I would highly recommend, encourage and enforce anyone to watch it. ~ Rhys Ifans

You have to start with the notion that you pick the actor who's going to embody the role, the best person that you can find. If you don't start with that then it sort of defies the whole purpose of trying to make the best film that you can make. ~ Christopher Meledandri

David has asked me, a number of people have asked me and said, What performance do you like best or what's the best film you've made and so on and I don't really have any hesitation that the film I'm least embarrassed by and ashamed of or uneasy about is Shadowlands. ~ Richard Attenborough

Trying to make a feature film yourself with no money is the best film school you can do. ~ Quentin Tarantino

I understand the feelings of critics asked to come up with the ten best films of any year, who say, Ten? Ten's a lot! - and those more generous spirits whose thumbs grow as long as Pinocchio's nose from overrating a lot of pictures, because they want the medium to do well, and because they'd like to feel good about it. ~ Edward Jay Epstein

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan. ~ Alex North

In my mid-20s, I was directing episodes of 'Alfred Hitchcock' and 'Peter Gunn.' I was pretty much on course and - as I sometimes joke - was prepared to devote my life to become the second best film director in my family. ~ George Stevens, Jr.

One hopes for that type of result but you just never know what factors will work in your favor. I think I just was concentrating on making the best film I could under the circumstances I was given. That's all I could really do. ~ Aurora Guerrero

These Are Not The Droids You Are Looking For. ~ George Lucas

When 'Mulholland Dr.' was voted the Best Film of the Decade, that was very meaningful for me. That film opened up incredible doors for me, and I believe that that was the reason I was given opportunities to play all kinds of characters. ~ Laura Harring

My best film is always my next film. I couldn't make Chungking Express now, because of the way I live and drink I've forgotten how I did it. I don't believe in film school or film theory. Just try and get in there and make the bloody film, do good work and be with people you love. ~ Christopher Doyle

You always want to make the best film you can. If anything I feel more relaxed after the Oscar. I feel like I have a chance to just tell the stories I want to tell and it's actually been really nice. ~ Morgan Neville

I worked as hard to write the worst film of the year as I did to write the best film of the year. ~ Brian Helgeland

I am the best film director in the world. ~ Lars Von Trier

'The Wicker Man' for me, as an actor, was definitely the best film I've ever done. ~ Christopher Lee

Sitting opposite Steven Spielberg, while he turns the pages of your script and talks about each scene as he goes, is about the best film school you can get. ~ Matt Charman

All I can do is try to do the best work I can. I need to work, I like to work ... although I complain about it, but I do like it - and I just need to make the best film I can. ~ Martin Scorsese

At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him. ~ Michael Haneke

Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt, and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man - and I'm in all of them. ~ Joseph Cotten

I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before. ~ Danny Boyle

And Eisenstein was doing it,too!As a young boy Sasha had seen his Battleship Potemkin in the Khudoshestvennyi Theater on the Arbat Sqaure.The cashiers,ticket-takers,cloak room attendants, all were dressed in sailors' uniforms;it looked just grand,it set the mood.The world had acknowledged BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN as the best film and Eisenstein as the greatest director.Now the 'greatest' was loyally serving the tyrant and executioner.Here was an example for his argument with Gleb about genius and villainy. Gleb also read the paper and gave Sasha a meaningful glance. 'Well then one more sycophant. ~ Anatoli Rybakov

Die Hard represents the class of modern action pictures and the standard by which they must be judged. Few films falling into the "mindless entertainment" genre have as much going for them as this movie. Not only is it a thrill-a-minute ride, but it has one of the best film villains in recent memory, a hero everyone can relate to, dialogue that crackles with wit, and a lot of very impressive pyrotechnics. ~ James Berardinelli

Your first film is always your best film, in a way. There's something about your first film that you never ever get back to, but you should always try. It's that slight sense of not knowing what you're doing, because the technical skills you learn - especially if you have a film that works, that has some kind of success - are beguiling. The temptation is to use them again, and they're not necessarily good storytelling techniques. ~ Danny Boyle

When I was doing 'Ordinary People' and 'Taps,' I never wondered if it would have a lasting impression. I was just wanting to make the best film we could and do my part in that and be true to what my responsibilities were. ~ Timothy Hutton

Nothing can teach you what it's like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature. ~ Rosamund Pike

The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions. ~ Edward Norton

And the best films feel like a fist punching you in the solar plexus and all elements of the filmmaking process - the acting, the design, the cinematography, the music, is all working to one end. ~ Ethan Hawke

I hate tooting my own horn, but after Steven Spielberg saw Yentl, he said: "I wish I could tell you how to fix your picture, but I can't. It's the best film I've seen since Citizen Kane". ~ Barbra Streisand

A filmmaker should never assume he's superior to his subject. I often find that even the simplest topic remains an enigma. The best film portraits not only evoke that enigma but ingest it in a process that renders what's invisible visible. ~ Damian Pettigrew

There is this old thing that a lot of people say - that the worst experiences make the best films. I don't subscribe to it. But I've seen it happen. ~ Domhnall Gleeson

Unlike an envied and admirable few, I separate my friends and almost never dare mingle one group with another. When I do, it is usually a social disaster, like mixing drinks. I love good beer and I love good wine, but you cannot drink both on the same evening without suffering. I love the friends with whom I play or once daily played snooker and tooted quantities of high-grade pulverized Andean flake; I love the friends with whom I dine at preposterously expensive restaurants; I love the friends with whom I'm film-making or mincing on the stage. I love and value them all equally and don't think of them as stratified or in tiers, one group in some way higher or more important than the rest, but the thought of introducing them to each other makes me shiver and shudder with cringing embarrassment. ~ Stephen Fry

Most of my films deal with people who are stuck in certain routines and habits that don't make them happy. They want to change, but they need something to push them. I think it's mostly love that causes them to break their routines and move on. ~ Wong Kar-Wai

Second films are, you know, like 'difficult second albums', so it's a tricky position to be in but I think he's made a highly accomplished film. ~ Andy Serkis

By nature, I think I am a pretty private person, and that is what is hard even doing interviews for films that I really love doing, because in some ways, it diminishes the experience that I had. ~ Steve Buscemi

I love family films. Of course, as a mother who has to watch so many movies, you really appreciate it when somebody makes a film that is for everybody - family entertainment that's really for the family, where everyone has a good time. ~ Salma Hayek

You have to be involved and relate to the characters in order to make a film that is true emotionally. ~ Spike Jonze

The collective sign of relief heaved on V-J Day ought to have inspired Hollywood to release a flood of "happily ever after" films. But some victors didn't feel too good about their spoils. They'd seen too much by then. Too much warfare, too much poverty, too much greed, all in the service of rapacious progress. A bundle of unfinished business lingered from the Depression - nagging questions about ingrained venality, mean human nature, and the way unchecked urban growth threw society dangerously out of whack. Writers and directors responded by delivering gritty, bitter dramas that slapped our romantic illusions in the face and put the boot to the throat of the smug bourgeoisie. Still, plenty of us took it - and liked it. ~ Eddie Muller

I'm a big fan of the 70's action films. Where there is a lot of character and a lot of great action, but the action is kind of cemented with a great back-story with characters. And I thought, this kind of reminded me of the movies that, early on when I was telling Dwayne (Johnson) and the guys, the producer ... my whole thing is if you look at a movie like The Driver by Walter Hill, it's a film where there's no names. They are just named, "the driver", "the cop". ~ George Tillman, Jr.

Thank God, 50 years ago I learned that a great song, our entire business is all based on two things; a great song and a great story. Film, television, if you don't have that story, nothing else matters. You don't call anybody else or direct anybody. The same with a song. A great song can make the worst singer in the world a star. ~ Quincy Jones

Benjamin Franklin performed a beautiful experiment using surfactants: on a pond at Clapham Common, he poured a small amount of oleic acid, a natural surfactant which tends to form a dense film at the water-air interface. ~ Pierre-Gilles De Gennes

I'd even say it's a realistic film because that's the way it happens in our heads; that was the idea. ~ Alain Resnais

In 1982 I bought the newly released Makina Plaubel 55mm fixed-lens camera. With this shift from 35mm to 6 x 7, I also changed from black and white to color. Later that year, I started my project on New Brighton called The Last Resort. However, the first project I shot in colour was composed of urban scenes from Liverpool. This image was on the second roll of film. It's the first good photo I made in this new chapter of my work. ~ Martin Parr

I did some feature work, then tried TV. I was always very aware that the only power that you have is the power of options. If the film industry dries up, then you focus on the TV or the books. For me, it was always about what story do I want to tell next? ~ Noah Hawley

You don't necessarily have to go to film school to be a brilliant film maker. If you are a good listener and you study life, and you find that story that is buried within each and every one of us, and you figure out a way to bring that out. And sometimes it doesn't necessarily mean money or winning the lottery. ~ Tony Todd

I've never been to Comic-Con, but I'm certainly aware from this side of the Atlantic that it's a very important part of film marketing now, even when the films are not directly linked to a comic. ~ Alex Garland

I think if I could do it over again - as much as I loved meeting the people I did on the films after 'Matilda' - I wish that I had stopped after 'Matilda.' I wish that I had just focused on my own life for a while. ~ Mara Wilson

I managed to get a short film with Channel 4 Films. I cast a young actor who'd done a bit of television before, a young actor called Ewan McGregor. That was very first thing. This writer had won this competition, and I made this little short, black and white movie. I think for both Ewan and I it was the start of our careers. ~ Justin Chadwick

It is a quintessential example of the whirling kinetics that drive a Keaton film, in which not just the medium but the human body- the permutations of the sinews, the shock of the limbs -seems infinitely elastic, an unruly instument to be wilded with a cheeky kind of grace. ~ Edward McPherson

There needs to be more film directors of colour. They bandy about the word 'diversity' a lot, but when I say 'of colour,' I mean Asian, black - I mean people of all colour. We need to have those voices given the opportunity, not told that their films will not be distributed or will not sell well abroad. ~ Marianne Jean-Baptiste

You will find hardly any improvising on camera anywhere in my films. It's very structured, but it's all worked out from elaborate improvisations over a long period, as you know. ~ Mike Leigh

For Twilight, I wasn't thinking it was going to be a crazy success, or anything. It had been rejected by all the major studios. Nobody wanted to make it and they didn't think it would make any money, but I read the book and I thought, "Wow, I want to capture that feeling of just being crazy in love. I wonder if I can do that in a film." That was my challenge. ~ Catherine Hardwicke

In truly great films - the ones that people need to make, the ones that start speaking through them, the ones that keep moving into territory that is more and more unfathomable and uncomfortable - nothing's ever simple or neatly resolved. You're left with a mystery. ~ Martin Scorsese

Everyone talks about how we're on our phones all the time, but the fact remains that when I'm away on a film set for two months, I can Skype my family. I remember the phone calls my parents had to make when my dad was away for a while when I was younger - that once-a-week expensive phone call! The time pressure on talking to your father! ~ Domhnall Gleeson

I was very friendly with Jimi Hendrix because my boyfriend at the time, Tommy Weber, was making a film about him, so I would go to all of his shows. ~ Charlotte Rampling

It's a word called symbiotic, you send the messages and it comes back in return. Together, it's a wonderful thing, it's why television is so great and film can never reach. ~ Robert Stack

Independent film is film that has thought in it. There's no independent thought in studio films. It's collective thought. ~ Seymour Cassel

I would love to do anything from a really gritty, interesting, indie type film, to that commercial, bigger stuff. ~ Meghan Markle

In theater, you're allowed to take your time and sit in a role for a month before you have to share it with anybody. In film and TV, you have to just kind of show up and be ready to do that, which, to me, is very strange and crazy. ~ Cory Michael Smith

The Coen brothers said something that helped me, When you put the book down, you have a certain feeling, a certain understanding. That's what they need to feel when they walk out of the theater. That's your job, to literally put this book on film, you won't make a good movie, you'll do no service to anyone. ~ Angelina Jolie

I did a short film at Outfest, 'Where Are the Dolls,' based on an Elizabeth Bishop poem done, where I play this woman who is sort of walking the streets and ends up alone dancing in a club. I have this hot and heavy scene with a very beautiful actress. It became very popular. ~ Megan Follows

I think every filmmaker wants ... I don't know about every filmmaker. I certainly want my films to just exist. I want them to be judged for what they are and analyzed, accepted, criticized, whatever you want to call it, on their own terms, not as part of some mall-cop genre. ~ Jody Hill