Film Noir Quotes

He had a face right out of film noir, a face meant to be shot in black and white, parallel shadows of venetian blinds slashing across it, a plume of cigarette smoke spiraling beside it. ~ Khaled Hosseini

In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.' ~ Jonas Mekas

She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story. ~ Catherynne M Valente

It was Ernie Haller, who had photographed Bette Davis in Jezebel and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, who was solely responsible for the visuals in Mildred Pierce, said Crawford. "Ernie was at the rehearsals. And so was Mr. [Anton] de Grot, who did the sets. I recall seeing Ernie's copy of the script and it was filled with notations and diagrams. I asked him if these were for special lights and he said, 'No, they're for special shadows.' Now, that threw me. I was a little apprehensive. I was used to the look of Metro, where everything, including the war pictures, was filmed in blazing white lights. Even if a person was dying there was no darkness. But when I saw the rushes of Mildred Pierce I realized what Ernie was doing. The shadows and half-lights, the way the sets were lit, together with the unusual angles of the camera, added considerably to the psychology of my character and to the mood and psychology of the film. And that, my dear, is film noir." "Mildred ~ Shaun Considine

I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting! ~ Marie Windsor

No American films?'

'I don't like comic strips.'

'Film noir?'

'Black is a very sentimental colour. You can hide any rubbish behind it. Hollywood flicks are fun, if your idea of a good time is a hamburger and a milk shake. America invented the movies so it would never need to grow up. We have angst, depression and middle-aged regret. They have Hollywood. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction. ~ Pauline Kael

Today, women have as much of a place as protagonists and antagonist as men. ~ JP Wolfe

I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I'm sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies. ~ Camille Paglia

There were some things that I found I really enjoyed singing about; like, on the title track, there's this film-noir character of a woman who's sort of losing it in a room. ~ Diana Krall

With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it. ~ Lana Wachowski

I'm working on something that's not yet novel-shaped but is something of a film-noir-flavored 'Alice in Wonderland.' It will also very likely be a single volume story and not the start of a series. ~ Erin Morgenstern

Yes, to me that's one of the most compelling fears in film noir and the psychological thriller genre - that fear of conspiracy. It's definitely something that I have a fear of - not being in control of your own life. I think that's something people can relate to, and those genres are most successful when they derive the material from genuine fears that people have. ~ Christopher Nolan

One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines. ~ Roger Ebert

A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet. ~ Raymond Chandler

Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white. ~ Paul Schrader

As the tall dark and handsome male star, Carey Grant always stands for male beauty and desirability, whether in a 30s screwball, a 40s film noir, or a 50s romantic comedy. He consequently turns around the orthodox gender between the one who looks and so desires, and the one who is looked at, and so is being desired. ~ Steven A. Cohen

There is something missing in a lot of digital filmmaking, something I call "poetic reality." That's something you see played out in film noir, where the technique establishes the mood. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground. ~ Werner Herzog

Billy Wilder is really is a heavy influence on Bound. We felt that film noir was a genre where you could create a really contained story. We wanted to be on a set as much as we could to get the kind of style level we were looking for. ~ Lana Wachowski

That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style. ~ Lawrence Kasdan

Film noir has a mood that everyone can feel. It's people in trouble, at night, with a little bit of wind and the right kind of music. It's a beautiful thing. ~ David Lynch

You and I are black and white - a film noir, filled with gestures, poignant and tender ~ John Geddes

Either you're going to shoot us or you're not. The ball always lands on red or black, never both. ~ V. Alexander

She was a cute as a washtub. ~ Raymond Chandler

When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Ox Bow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross that defines what kind of drama it is. ~ Samuel Fuller

I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze. Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don't want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it's frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting ... I quite like to be in that maze. ~ Christopher Nolan

To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found to be swarming with numberless allusions to the popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happeend to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the hippopotami are affected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I think every film actor secretly wants to be a rock star as well; just that part of the job which requires the extrovert in you. Even if you've become an actor because it's your way of hiding in plain sight, there's still part of you which has that craving. ~ Ben Barnes

My son tried to work in films and he ultimately gave it up, he finally couldn't make a living, he couldn't support himself. He worked all the time and he didn't make enough money to have a house, have an apartment. ~ Jeffrey Jones

The great thing about an independent film is that you're too busy working, and you're too busy hoping to God to get it done. ~ Ann Dowd

When I got into the film world, I got sucked into the secular aspect of the entertainment field and I really drifted away from my faith. Its amazing ... as successful as I was as an actor, and the money and the fame, there was still something missing. ~ Chuck Norris

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

I wanted to do dance with the same seriousness as art was done and acknowledged, not with the entertainment factor that is always connected to theater and film. ~ Tino Sehgal

You just have to take control of your own performance. ~ Damian Lewis

Hopefully with digital projection, a film will always look the way the filmmaker intended. ~ Asif Kapadia

In a sense, comic books are frozen movies. If you look at a comic book, you are generally seeing the storyboard for a film. The great advantage of comic books, over the years, has been that, if they are frozen movies, they are not limited by budget. They are only limited by imagination. ~ Michael Uslan

I did a film which was considered an independent movie with Dustin Hoffman and Andy Garcia called Confidence, and that's the type of film I was willing to take a chance on that because of the caliber of people involved with the film. ~ Morris Chestnut

Body Electric ... It is the first song from my new short film called # Tropico that is coming out in the end of the month. ~ Lana Del Rey

Who says that actors are cattle? Show me a cow who can earn a million dollars a film. ~ Langdon Winner

The evolution of Parkour sort of happens with time and age as you change, and the body has a certain memory of Parkour. There is a sort of thing that remains intrinsic, but then the choreography will adapt to whatever the necessity of each particular film needs. ~ David Belle

Free time keeps me going. It's just something that's always been a part of my life. I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films. ~ Gus Van Sant

I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it. ~ Peter Greenaway

You look up after many years and you find that a film has become a classic because it's meaningful to people and alive, decade after decade. ~ Woody Allen

Love is alive when there's music in your heart. ~ A.D. Posey

Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison. ~ C.S. Lewis

I would love to do a film in Africa. ~ Judi Shekoni

I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's ... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes. ~ David Mitchell

The day you shoot something, everything changes. You still have the same overall vision and approach. You create a world that you're going to be true to or the film tells you what you're going to do. And so, it's like you've got a philosophy of what you're doing. You try and have that changing texturally over the movie. ~ Fred Schepisi

I want to do acting as much as I can. When you're on contract with a show, you can't really do other shows. It's hard to do film. I haven't had the opportunity to even audition much for films because I don't have an agent. ~ Retta

Close-Up is a very particular film in my oeuvre. It's a film that was made in a very particular way; mainly because I didn't really have the time to think about how to go about making the film. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

I was able to capture on film things the actors didn't even know they were doing. ~ Elia Kazan

I'm really clear about my priority in life-it's being a mom. ~ Teri Hatcher

Once you prove yourself, that you're a utility player, they're going to contact you and say, hey, yeah, we need you for a film next Thursday at Fox or Sony or whatever. You kind of get a reputation. ~ Bob Bergen

I love it all. I don't want to go through my career with one hand tied behind my back. I love making kids happy. I love the midnight audience. I like intense dramas. And I like high-adrenaline action films. ~ Nicolas Cage

When I read a film script, I kind of see it in my head and I see the moments that shape what I understand the character to be. There's very little time for rehearsal. ~ Karen Allen

Certainly my films are cinematically unusual, and quite contemplative in their pacing compared to conventional films, but I think overall they are quite engaging, accessible, and even funny. ~ Jenni Olson

It's never a script that makes me decide to accept a film or not. ~ Jean-Louis Trintignant

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely! ~ David Hockney

Every film is hard to fund. ~ Ira Sachs

I do not make films which are prescriptive, and I do not make films that are conclusive. You do not walk out of my films with a clear feeling about what is right and wrong. They're ambivalent. You walk away with work to do. My films are a sort of investigation. They ask questions ... Sometimes I hear that some [Hollywood] studio is interested in me. Then they discover that this is the guy who works with no script, that there is no casting discussion, no interference, that I have the final cut, and that does it. ~ Mike Leigh

Sometimes things just aren't of their time, and they take a minute to catch on, or they find an audience later. Sometimes bizarre little films are the ones that everyone remembers later. With most big major blockbusters, people will have already forgotten about it two weeks after it came out. ~ Rob Zombie

I suppose the most fun I had was on the second film. ~ David Prowse

Now I'm the father of three young boys, I find myself using GoPro to film them more than anything - trips to the amusement park, the beach, the pool - just chasing them around as they grow. ~ Nick Woodman

You have to learn to express differently. Whenever I do TV or film, I ask if I can see the shot to see, to see if it's full body or a close-up. That helps me understand how to communicate. ~ Denis O'Hare

It's certainly difficult to balance marketing a film and putting it out there to everybody with wanting to keep it fresh for the audience. ~ Christopher Nolan

When I really love a movie, I don't want to spoil it by too frequent visits. But I like to come back to certain films, which I admire. ~ Roman Polanski

When I did '21 Jump Street,' I felt like I was a part of something great, but on a very large scale. Working with people that genuinely want to make good art or good work or a good film, that's what keeps me going. ~ Spencer Boldman

Today with the Internet, I search for film and video archives online. It's an ever-growing moveable visual feast of delicacies from all around the world. ~ Elisa Kreisinger