Film Festival Quotes

On one occasion, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and myself were due to appear at the Sarajevo film festival and were turned off a UN plane on orders from Geneva. We had to get local journalists to transport the films in for us. I tell you this only to demonstrate that festivals can be a lifeline. But, after all the difficulties I'd had in getting there, in 1996 I found myself being flown in on a four-seater RAF plane as an official guest, endorsed by the British Embassy. Ironically, the film I was to present was Mission: Impossible. ~ Vanessa Redgrave

It took Cianfrance 12 years to bring 'Blue Valentine' to the screen after he first conceived it. He found Gosling and Williams early on, and they hung in there with him. The film finally premiered at Sundance 2010, then screened at Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival before landing in theaters in December. ~ Katie Hafner

The really cool thing is all about being able to take your movie around and show it. It puts you in direct contact with people who are like-minded and interested in similar things. I think the film festival circuit has certainly helped to foster the community. ~ Joe Swanberg

There has never been a female director who has won an Oscar. There has only been one woman who won at the Cannes Film Festival. ~ Salma Hayek

I actually know the moment I became known. It was at the Cannes Film Festival, when they showed 'The Virgin Spring.' I walked into that theater as one person, and I walked out as another. ~ Max Von Sydow

I went to the Tokyo Film Festival in Japan because I love Japanese cinema. ~ Leslie Caron

The Cannes film festival is about big-budget films but also remarkable films made in different political regimes by film-makers with little resources. ~ Kristin Scott Thomas

I did a short film called 'Disco' and won an award for Best Supporting Actor at an indie film festival, and that was nice. Hopefully there's lots more to come. ~ Charlie Rowe

The frustrating part of it is that you're generally known for what you did last. I've had the privilege of doing some very cool independent films that, a lot of the time, the general public doesn't see unless you're at a film festival or you're into that kind of movie. ~ Hayden Panettiere

Next time
we will roll out the red carpet for you in the United States of Arabia, my brethren! ~ Leonard Leventon

Tribeca Film Festival Doha will be both an industry festival and an audience festival, not just an event for insiders. Community outreach will be a major part of what we're doing. We'll put filmmakers in touch with local, regional, and international audiences. ~ Craig Hatkoff

What's great about the Sundance Film Festival is the festival takes over that town as it's intended to do. But, it's very focused on a lot of other filmmakers and distributors so it almost feels like, while they're a lot of so-called civilians there, it's an opportunity that you have to see, to show your stuff to the other folks, your peers really, and to get that reaction. ~ Alex Gibney

It's a very strange experience to watch yourself in a movie anyway. I most frequently don't do it, but if I was going to do it, I would do it in a private way, not at a public screening at a film festival, which is just an overwhelming experience. ~ Jesse Eisenberg

Doing that, then doing a lot of theater, which I love. Doing guest stars, did two independent films that are going around to all these festivals. Both of them are going to be at the Lake Tahoe Film Festival. ~ Austin Peck

When my film went to the Venice Film Festival and won the best script writing, the jury [prize], it didn't go to my head. I know how many black filmmakers that I am operating with whose name will never be mentioned. But I'm part of them in that silent existence. ~ Haile Gerima

I went to Poland for the Warsaw Film Festival, and it was quite an intense experience. I didn't think it would be, but it did feel quite emotional to go back to this place I'd heard so much about. ~ Lenny Abrahamson

The whole being-in-a-room interview thing, at a junket or a film festival, is very inhuman. You meet the person, have five or 10 minutes to talk, and it's not like a conversation. ~ Paul Dano

I'll never forget the first screening at the Berlin Film Festival. As soon as the film ended there was an outbreak of booing, which made us look at each other with some surprise. ~ John Schlesinger

You can't host an Italian film festival without Marcello Mastroianni. It just doesn't feel right. ~ Gia Coppola

Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica. ~ Roger Ebert

Now I'm doing a film festival for kids and writing a script about a kidnapped journalist in Afghanistan. ~ Olivia Wilde

I have an Italian comedy at the Venice Film Festival. ~ Robert Englund

I have a second bedroom I don't use. I'm going to start the Second Bedroom Film Festival. You're all invited. ~ Vincent Schiavelli

When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival. ~ Rory Kennedy

In December of 2001, after September 11th, my wife, Jane Rosenthal, and Robert DeNiro asked me if I would help them create the Tribeca Film Festival. The idea was to revitalize lower Manhattan. We would show films on piers, in high schools. It was all about the community. We wanted it to be accessible to everybody. ~ Craig Hatkoff

Well I was on the jury duty on the Deauville Film Festival, a few years ago. ~ Liam Neeson

New York is the perfect place for a film festival because there's already so much energy and life here, and New Yorkers love movies. ~ Clark Gregg

Anyone for a Film Festival?: ~ Jerome Pitt

If you go to a film festival and watch a bunch of features and then watch a bunch of shorts, you will almost always find that the shorts are where people are taking more risks and pushing more boundaries ... simply because they have much less to lose. ~ Don Hertzfeldt

I got nominated for my second film as best young director in the Aikido Film Festival in Japan. ~ Donnie Yen

I love the Cannes Film Festival. From the lavish parties and events to the red carpet attire, this star-studded week-long event is where I get a lot of inspiration for hair and fashion. ~ Tabatha Coffey

Telluride has an incredible history and reputation, and I've long known of it as a unique entity that makes a place for writers - one more aspect of this exceptional film festival in the Colorado Alps. ~ Rachel Kushner

When you go to a film festival as an audience member, it's so much fun. But when you bring your own film there, you carry so much stress and excitement. ~ Mora Stephens

The first rule of all filmmaking is that every scene should start at the last possible moment and end at the first possible moment. ~ Austin Film Festival

I had lived in Fukuoka during the mid 1990s, and I was a volunteer with the Fukuoka Asian Film Festival. ~ John Foster

When I met Bono at the Cannes Film festival while I was there for the film 'United 93,' he said to me, 'That's a great film, brother. Thank you for your courage in making it.' I plotzed. ~ David Alan Basche

I watch many, many, many independent films every year that you see once in a film festival and they're never heard of ever again. Many of them are very, very good. ~ Karen Allen

Bryan gaped, as though that was more than he'd been expecting. "Oh. Okay. Well, um, there's a silent film festival downtown next week. Do you think you'd want to go?"
I shook my head. "No, I don't think so. I respect it as an art form but really don't get much out of watching them."
"Huh. Okay." He smoothed his hair back again, and I could almost see him groping for thoughts. Why on earth was he asking me about silent films? "What about Starships 30? It opens Friday. Do you want to see that?"
" I don't really like sci-fi either," I said. It was true, I found it completely implausible.
Bryan looked ready to rip that shaggy hair out. "Is there any movie out there you want to see?"
I ran through a mental list of current entertainment. "No. Not really." The bell rang, and with a shake of his head, Bryan slunk back to his desk. "That was weird," I muttered. "He has bad taste in movies." Glancing beside me, I was startled to see Julia with her head down on the desk while she shook with silent laughter. "What?"
"That," she gasped. "That was hilarious."
"What?" I said again. "Why?"
"Sydney, he was asking you out! ~ Richelle Mead

My dad made a film called 'Willow' when he was a young filmmaker, which screened at the Cannes film festival, and people were booing afterwards. ~ Bryce Dallas Howard

Each year we go to the Cannes film festival and I tend to have all my friends pile in the back of my car and we'll drive from London. The poor production company think they're only putting me up and suddenly they've got eight people sleeping on my hotel room floor. ~ Jeremy Irvine

There is a little bit of everybody in everybody. ~ Leonard Leventon

I was being taken around by a press agent at the Venice Film Festival at age 18. Was it fun? Sure. But it was a dangerous path to be walking on as far as having a substantive life. Because the casualty rate at the Venice Film Festival for 18-year-olds? High. ~ Ethan Hawke

The film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep. For a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a facade, the largest stage set in the world. Without realizing it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles. As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit. ~ J.G. Ballard

Jewish people, we're repulsed by Hitler, but we're obsessed with him. If you ever want to rob a Jewish person's house, all you have to do is call them up and tell them there's a Hitler film festival down at the multiplex - watch them file out. ~ Andy Kindler

Every year there's a jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Getting on the jury is very competitive in France. Not because the French love cinema, but because they love to judge. ~ Craig Ferguson

Well I'm Superman, just not action. I'm kind of looking for something with a lot less action and more talking and listening. I also have a film that's premiering Vegas Film Festival, short film, directed by Joel Kelly, it's called Denial and it's a story, short film, 35 mm short film and it's about a man's struggle to choose between the woman of his dreams and his reality, so it's definitely different than Superman. So I'm really proud of that. ~ Brandon Routh

American Horrors is one of the only shows out there showcasing the best new talent working the genre. It's also one hell of a good time"
~Michael J. Hein/NYC Horror Film Festival Founder/Director ~ Michael J. Hein

The very first thing I saw at this year's Telluride Film Festival was sheer bliss. "Lava," a musical romance from Pixar Animation, was one of the shorts that traditionally precede almost every festival screening; the director was James Ford Murphy. The story, spanning millions of years in 7 minutes, starts with a lonely Hawaiian volcano who, crooning to ukulele accompaniment, yearns for "someone to lava. ~ Anonymous

I quite like that people tend not to know my name. I remember being at the Cannes film festival for 'All or Nothing.' I looked very different in the film - I had a little greasy bob and no makeup. I went to a dinner after the screening, and everyone completely ignored me. I got a real buzz out of that. ~ Lesley Manville

Religions fulfill deep-seated psychological needs for people, and if you don't get it from a specific religious doctrine, you'll get it from the kind of films I like to make. A film like The Terminator is consciously meant to give a sense of empowerment to the individual. ~ James Cameron

Me too." I agree fervently. "Every film should definitely have a message."
Which is true. I mean ... take the Lord of the Rings movies- they've got loads of messages. Like "Don't lose your ring. ~ Sophie Kinsella

I love the finality of film. When you make a movie, you know the beginning, middle, and end. ~ Elizabeth Banks

And although I've been very fortunate in the film work that's come my way, I need to get back to the stage. If I'm away for a maximum of two years, I feel something's wrong. ~ Ralph Fiennes

I like 'The Usual Suspects'. Great film. I also like 'Scarface', films like that. Lots of gangster films. I really like watching all kinds of films, dramas, romance. I'll watch comedies. I like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle. I'd like to meet them. ~ Barkhad Abdi

On his thirteenth birthday he had seen a film in which the central character was a painter who, unable to sell his work, grew cold and hungry as he went from one unsuccessful interview to the next; eventually he had become a vagrant, sleeping in the streets of the city where once he had walked in hope. Hawksmoor left the cinema in a mood of profound, terrified apprehension and, from that time, he was filled with a sense of time passing and with the fear that he might be left discarded on its banks. The fear had not left him, although now he could no longer remember from where it came: he looked back on his earlier life without curiosity, since it seemed to lack intrinsic interest, and when he looked forward he saw the same steady attainment of goals without any joy in their attainment. For him, the state of happiness was simply the state of not suffering and, if he cared for anything, it was for oblivion. ~ Peter Ackroyd

I have an incredible team of collaborators that work with me on all my films. I adore them and respect them tremendously. I can't wait to begin production on my next film so we can be reunited. ~ Dori Berinstein

No, I did a film called 'Death and the Compass' as well. ~ Alex Cox

If you do an original film and you want to cut a scene out you do it. But when you do a shot by shot remake you don't have that option and every scene has to work again. ~ Michael Haneke

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them. ~ Alexander Gould

I had experience with PTSD myself; probably that's why I felt so close to the soldiers and the testimony. Also, because I had experienced this myself, I wanted to make a really physical and carnal film. ~ Alice Winocour

WHEN the candles are lit on the Christmas Tree, the human soul feels as though the symbol of an eternal reality were standing there, and that this must always have been the symbol of the Christmas Festival, even in a far distant past. For in the autumn, when outer Nature fades, when the sun's creations fall as it were into slumber and man's organs of outer perception must turn away from the phenomena of the physical world, the soul has the opportunity - nay not only the opportunity but the urge - to withdraw into its innermost depths, in order to feel and to experience: Now, when the light of the outer sun is faintest and its warmth feeblest, now is the time when the soul withdraws into the darkness but can find within itself the inner, spiritual Light. ~ Anonymous

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

'Biutiful' is a tough film. It doesn't make concessions to the vulgarity of light entertainment. It's not the kind of film that you see every day in the Cineplex. But as an artist, it's the thing that I needed to do. ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

The truth of the matter is, every film is imperfect. It's the nature of the beast. One of the things that people ask me all the time is, what's the difference between theater and film, and one of the biggest differences is, in the theater you always get another go. ~ Stephen Daldry

Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy . Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. ~ Roger Ebert

You make a film for a million dollars and then it costs $10 million to sell it. That's the problem at the moment with independent filmmaking: You can make it cheap and then there's no money to market it. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

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

When a film company is in the red they come to me. Always it is the same. ~ Bela Lugosi

I've had the good fortune of studying the 17th-century art of Amsterdam in preparation for a film. ~ Jack O'Connell

I've played guitar and piano for a while, so it's really fun to play music on film. ~ Austin Butler

While I was studying film at the Academy, the problems started. I wasn't a political activist directly in the time of Saddam [Hussein], because the dictator was so cruel and brutal that no one could criticize or complain. I felt futile and empty. The only solution in Iraq was to run away. ~ Hassan Blasim

Sumire was a hopeless romantic, a bit set in her ways - innocent of the ways of the world, to put a nice spin on it. Start her talking and she'd go on nonstop, but if she was with someone she didn't get along with - most people in the world, in other words - she barely opened her mouth. She smoked too much, and you could count on her to lose her ticket every time she took the train. She'd get so engrossed in her thoughts at times she'd forget to eat, and she was as thin as one of those war orphans in an old Italian film - like a stick with eyes. I'd love to show you a photo of her but I don't have any. She hated having her photograph taken - no desire to leave behind for posterity a Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man. ~ Haruki Murakami

I'm sure the movie industry is going up but I would love to see more Chinese films about contemporary Chinese about the problems of life on the street. ~ Paz Vega

When I started, there was something almost romantic about the notion of paparazzi. I mean, it wasn't. They were still chasing you down the road. But that guy had to put film in his camera and work out whether it was worth pressing the button to take the shot, otherwise he's got to stop and change the film. So it was like this age of innocence. ~ Kylie Minogue

I never sit in a cinema and go, "Ah! I want to be in that film!" ~ Carey Mulligan

You learn quite a bit about your film from test screening audiences. With both comedies and movies that are intense, you need to calibrate the film and see how audiences react. ~ Rod Lurie

I went to Oberlin College, and they don't have a film major, but they do have what's called an individual major, where you can sort of pitch to a committee your own course study, and if they approve it, you have essentially just designed your own major. So Oberlin doesn't have a film major; they do have a film minor.And then my spring semester of my junior year, I went off to NYU film school as a visiting student - they have a program for kids from other schools to come in for a semester. ~ Ed Helms

I was always doing films, but the ceramics didn't come until later. I did take ceramics in university, which gave me an appetite for the medium, but I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with it yet. ~ Marcel Dzama

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

When you're making a film, you have an obligation to fill the frame with life. ~ Joss Whedon

When I saw the Cameron Crowe film We Bought A Zoo, it got me to thinking about how our lives are structured the same way as the zoo that was purchased by Benjamin Mee totally changed ~ Mike Vardy

I enjoy the making of the film and it's something for me to do. If nobody ever comes to my films, if people don't want to give me money to make films, that will stop me. But as long as people come all over the world and I have an audience and I have ideas for films, I will do them for as long as I enjoy the process. And I like the whole process of making a film. ~ Woody Allen

Cocteau is someone who has made such a profound impression on me that there's no doubt he's influenced every one of my films. ~ Jacques Rivette

Racism and prejudice exist there [at the National Film Board] like anywhere else. My history at the Board has not been easy. It's been a long walk. ~ Alanis Obomsawin

Just the very thought of someone my age going to visit old girlfriends had instant appeal.Even women think, 'That would be interesting.' Not comfortable, but interesting. It is not a comfortable film at any point. ~ Bill Murray

Music is so much fun because each song is like a film in itself. You get to go from beginning to end and interact and exchange energy with a live audience. ~ Shawnee Smith

One of the aspects I like about the film is that there is a kind of emotional, psychological discussion during the storytelling, ... Before taking a drug, go through yourself, experience yourself, all your hopes and fears in your own time. Before the pharmacology, do the psychology. ~ Keanu Reeves

Today in Nepal, devotees of the goddess Gadhimai celebrate her festival every five years in the village of Bariyapur. A record was set in 2009 when 250,000 animals were sacrificed to the goddess. A local driver explained to a visiting British journalist that 'If we want anything, and we come here with an offering to the goddess, within five years all our dreams will be fulfilled.'26 ~ Yuval Noah Harari