Great Film Quotes

I want to work with great filmmakers and great actors and get better as an actor. ~ Bradley Cooper

Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want. ~ Martha Grimes

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", great story, great film. ~ Deyth Banger

When I begin a film, I want to make a great film. Halfway through, I just hope to finish the film. ~ Francois Truffaut

Tisch has a great film program and a great acting program, but they are segregated; you don't really intertwine. My peers knew I liked acting, so they'd be like, 'Go get that guy Gubler. He'll be in your student film.' I was in the same building. I became their go-to guy. So I left NYU having been in probably one thousand short films. ~ Matthew Gray Gubler

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer. ~ Paul Auster

There are lots of great movies coming out of the U.S. but it's not something I've ever really been interested in. They're great films but I much prefer the smaller independent films, which are more thought provoking and experimental. ~ Billie Piper

Sometimes you read a script, and you just think, 'Wow, I would love to go and tell that story, and I don't even care what happens to the film, I would just love that experience.' And often, that mentality makes a great film. ~ Jim Sturgess

Any film that supports the idea that things can be changed is a great film in my eyes. ~ Wim Wenders

I think the fantasy of being a movie star is more powerful than the reality. So, for me, even if it's not a great film or a great play I'm doing, to know that you went for it. You had an experience that made you grow artistically and personally. What's really satisfying is knowing that you did a good job. ~ Marisa Tomei

Great film roles, they always take you to another place. I'd love to do more of that, but I keep doing lots of voiceovers, some TV spots, and some film roles have come along, so I'm okay. ~ Benito Martinez

The Lego Movie: Merely a great film, or the greatest film ever in the history of cinema? ~ Christy Lemire

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth? ~ Jess Walter

If you make a great film full of emotion, of pathos, people want to continue to know more, to work harder. ~ Pamela Yates

There's a para-phrase about Orson Welles saying: "Great films are made by great directors and the rest are made by everyone else." I've been very lucky ... before I start insulting the profession of directing, but I think a good director is everything and a bad director really is nothing at all. ~ Colin Firth

Hot Fuzz in a strange way, for me, summons up the spirit of watching R-rated films that I was too young to watch. I was 14, 13 maybe, when Robocop came out. Seeing Robocop at my brother's friend's house, and not really supposed to be watching it, because it was [rated] 18 and I was 13. That mind-blowing experience, because not only is it a great film, but it feels illicit. ~ Edgar Wright

If it's a great role or a great film, then you're happy to be a part of it. ~ Guy Pearce

One of the secrets of being a great photographic model, as it is for a great film actor, is that you let the camera in. It's an intimacy that the model or actor creates with the lens, that then transmits itself to the viewer. ~ Mary Harron

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film. ~ Michael Giacchino

You Can't Kill Stephen King, the great film of all time what more awesome than that??
You can't guess or find who is the killer! ~ Deyth Banger

I watch 'Goodfellas,' and suddenly it frees me up entirely; it reminds me of what great film directing is all about. ~ Peter Jackson

Mick Jagger has produced some great films and brought us stories about the music industry that have changed the way we think about how music is made. ~ Olivia Wilde

I'm in total awe of the technique of great film people. Because if you get your emotional life up to perfection by miracle on Take One, you better have a technique to keep doing it again and again and again. ~ Ali MacGraw

I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: 'A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.' I do believe that. Not superior to all other people, but to some, most probably including those who think Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is a great film. That is not simply ego on my part. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than 40 years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy. ~ Roger Ebert

[Steven Spielberg's films] are comforting, they always give you answers and I don't think they're very clever answers ... The success of most Hollywood films these days is down to fact that they're comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows and give you answers, even if the answers are stupid, you go home and you don't have to think about it ... The great filmmakers make you go home and think about it. ~ Terry Gilliam

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none. ~ David Hare

I've always believed that if you want to really try and make a great film, not a good film, but a great film, you have to take a lot of risks. ~ Christopher Nolan

You start out with big dreams and I mean, big dreams artistically. You want to work with the greatest living directors, make a great movie. I wanted to make a great love story, I wanted to make a great epic and then you realize that the truth of it is that it's so hard to make a great film. It's hard to get a great role. Those big expectations change to realism pretty quickly. But what's never changed is my desire to work with great directors and to find projects that push me out of my comfort zone and keep me alive. I still don't think I've done my best work ~ Nicole Kidman

Sometimes you're watching a great film actor, and if you stand 10 feet away from them, you're like, 'God, they're terrible. They're not doing anything.' And then you see the close-up, and it's so nuanced, and so much expression is happening. They were acting for that camera and for no one else. ~ Finn Wittrock

I just want to keep doing things completely different from the other. I just want to keep working with great people, great filmmakers and great actors and just building on that experience. ~ Christopher Egan

I always think it's better to take a smaller role in a great film rather than a leading role in something that you don't have complete faith in. ~ Charlie Hunnam

I don't think any actor has the luxury of knowing exactly what scripts are going to turn out well and what ones aren't. It would be wonderful to have that particular skill, and maybe people like Tom Cruise have it more than most, but you go into each project hoping that a good, if not great, film will come out the other end. ~ Jonny Lee Miller

As far as writing, I like watching bad movies. Nothing stops me in my tracks more than watching a great film like 'The Godfather' or 'Dog Day Afternoon' or 'The Graduate.' You watch one of those, and you never want to write again. Whereas with bad movies, it makes you think, If that counts, I certainly could write. ~ Jason Reitman

On the one hand, we had great filmic spectacles that brought in big audiences, adults as well as primary and secondary school students. On the other hand, there were attempts to create contemporary Polish film. ~ Andrzej Wajda

The collective experience of watching a great film together in a room is a transcendent moment that will never die. ~ Gael Garcia Bernal

As the cinematographer is usually more visual than the director is and full cooperation is really the answer and to make a great film, you need a good director and you need a good cinematographer. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s. ~ John Cusack

The film industry sees the writer as fungible: The thinking goes, As long as we have Brad Pitt and all this money, we have a great film! No, you need a writer with voice and an engaging story, or what you have is a bomb. ~ Melissa Rosenberg

Looper is another great film. ~ Deyth Banger

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

I do feel like 'The Dark Knight' is a great film, but that Batman in there? He's almost like Robocop to me. He's almost robotic looking; he's got this surgical approach to everything ... He's almost not human. That's supposed to be his whole point: he's supposed to be the most human of superheroes. ~ Lee Bermejo

When you are making the one you are doing, you think it is the greatest film going. And then you do another one and it is a great film. ~ Nick Nolte

We work in an environment where your options are to do, you know, Batman 10, so when you get to do a movie that's a really great film like this, people really step up to the plate and enjoy it. ~ James Woods

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

Our biggest art forms are film and television, and there hasn't been a great film about 9/11 yet, nor has there been a great television series. Something like The Wire gives us a rich and fully achieved picture of the wasteful, cruel War on Drugs; something like The White Ribbon gives a perspective on World War I that could only have been presented long after the event itself. ~ Teju Cole

I want make more records with my sister. I want to go on the road. I want to tour around the world. I want to continue to make great films and work with incredible directors that I respect and look up to. ~ AJ Michalka

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction! ~ Gene Wilder

I never had a great role in a great film. ~ Gloria Stuart

I don't have any expectations about my films. If they're good, they're good - if they're not, they're not. About 10 years ago, I remember going to see one of my movies - I can't even remember which one now - and everyone was jumping up and down, getting excited, saying what a great film it was going to be. We all went in and watched it, and it was the slowest movie I've ever seen. The next day, the reviews were terrible and half the studio was fired. ~ Anthony Hopkins

Woody Allen - nobody has been a better joke teller than him - and even in his great films, it's always coming out of the character. If you don't have that, jokes are just empty and I think that people rely too much on jokes. ~ Brett Gelman

Some people make a great film and then they can't follow up. ~ Woody Harrelson

I'm going to be a great film star. That is, if booze and sex don't get me first. ~ Jay Presson Allen

I've always felt really lucky to get to work with really great filmmakers. For me, the whole objective is just to hopefully be of service to what they want. ~ Bryce Dallas Howard

I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody, along with Vincent Price, who I celebrate, and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre. ~ Nicolas Cage

'Liberace's a great film. It's a great piece of material. I have a great script and it's a great score. ~ Jerry Weintraub

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

With the right movie, 3D can enhance the experience. Absolutely, it can make a good film a great film. It can make a great film a really amazing film to see . ~ Peter Jackson

I'm not looking for a challenge, necessarily. I'm looking to make a really great film. ~ Mads Mikkelsen

I loved the material when I first read it, and the experience of making the film was a great one. So when we came around to complete the trilogy, I just signed on board without even reading the scripts because the experience of the first film was so good. ~ Keanu Reeves

I've done great theatre, great films and had a lot of opportunities in television. I also love to sing, and I've been able to do that once or twice in the television shows. ~ Scott Bakula

The only nonhuman existence is what we call our human life. If we live our human life and none other, directly, then we subject ourselves to the most inhuman of all conditionsČ slavery to family and national taboos, wars, illness, poverty, deatah. Even the phrase "earning our living" is inhuman. Without religion or art or analysis to transpose the stark horror, we fall into the malady of our age with its great devotion to naturalism. A painting in a house is there to represent a color, a form, a realm we may not have been able to possess. A book opens a realm which our need to earn a living may have made unattainable. Everything that helps us to transpose the unbearable into a myth also helps the creation of distance from our inhuman life, to allow us to mix a little objectivity with the harsh, violent torments of our human bondage. ~ Anais Nin

It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death ... I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation. ~ William Styron

There's no great dividing line between being a kid and an adult. We're not all caterpillars turning into butterflies. You are what you are. When you grow up, you may be more careful than when you were a kid. You don't say what you think as much as you once did. You learn to play nice. But you're still the same person who did good things or rotten things when you were young. Whether you feel good about them or bad ... whether you regret them. Well, that's a different thing. But it's not like they disappear forever. ~ Matthew Dicks

It is our entire culture, the way it runs on money, rewards inhumanity, encourages disconnection and isolation, causes great inequality and suffering, that's the enemy. That is the only enemy worth fighting. ~ Jessa Crispin

Kevin Smith is so great in 'Kingdom Come,' isn't he? He's kind of this very earthy poet. He just has this immediate gregariousness, like, you kind of just want to be his pal. ~ Daniel Gillies

Staying, we all know, is not the norm in our mobile culture. A great deal of money is spent each day to create desires in each of us that can never be fulfilled. I suspect that much of our restlessness is a return on this investment. ~ Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Digital dictatorships are not the only danger awaiting us. Alongside liberty, liberal order has also set great store by the value of equality. Liberalism always cherished political equality, and it gradually came to realise that economic equality is almost as important. For without a social safety net and a modicum of economic equality, liberty is meaningless. But just as Big Data algorithms might extinguish liberty, they might simultaneously create the most unequal societies that ever existed. All wealth and power might be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation, but from something far worse – irrelevance. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Have we," asks Claude de Saint-Martin, the great 'unknown philosopher,' "have we advanced one step further on the radiant path of enlightenment, that leads to the simplicity of men?" Let us wait in silence: perhaps ere long we shall be conscious of "the murmur of the gods. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck

They say that to be a writer you must first have an unhappy childhood. I don't know if unhappiness is necessary, but I think maybe some children who have suffered a loss too great for words grow up into writers who are always trying to find those words, trying to find a meaning for the way they have lived ~ Cynthia Rylant

When Mr. Collins could be forgotten, there was really an air of great comfort throughout, and by Charlotte's evident enjoyment of it, Elizabeth supposed he must be often forgotten. ~ Jane Austen

One of the great undiscovered joys of life comes from doing everything one attempts to the best of one's ability. The smallest task, well done, becomes a miracle of achievement. ~ Og Mandino

We are not to suppose, that there is any violent exertion of power, such as is required in order to produce a great event in little time; in nature, we find no deficiency in respect of time, nor any limitation with regard to power. But time is not made to flow in vain; nor does there ever appear the exertion of superfluous power, or the manifestation of design, not calculated in wisdom to effect some general end. ~ James Hutton

Madam Speaker, it is time to halt illegal entry into this country. It is time to halt the flow of illegal drugs and weapons into this great Nation, and it is time to secure our borders. ~ Marsha Blackburn

A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave of a great flood that whirls me to the sea. But, as you will! we'll sit contentedly, and eat our pot of honey on the grave. ~ George Meredith

It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization. ~ Albert Camus

Right now my career is totally schizophrenic, because when an American production like Hitchcock Presents asks to see my work I would never dream of showing them my independent films. ~ Atom Egoyan

To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful, and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one that he has always known. As ~ Carlo Rovelli

Never admit that your back goes out more than you do ~ Joan Rivers

Who am I? The great inquiry indeed. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I'm one person and by the time I finish I'm another. ~ Dario Argento

Great design is serious, not solemn ~ Paula Scher

A National Database on Autism Research is fostering sharing of data and collaborations. Scientists are also making great strides at the interface of biology and engineering with new technologies that are laying the groundwork for future advances. ~ Thomas R. Insel

The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand. ~ Clive James

It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was never, quite, my own idea of myself - and Malcolm was considered to be a "racist in reverse." This formulation, in terms of power - and power is the arena in which racism is acted out - means absolutely nothing: it may even be described as a cowardly formulation. The powerless, by definition, can never be "racists," for they can never make the world pay for what they feel or fear except by the suicidal endeavor which makes them fanatics or revolutionaries, or both. ~ James Baldwin

It can be easy to love all beings from a distance; it can be a great challenge when we have to live with them. ~ Gil Fronsdal

Love can make a great celebration out of your life - but only love, not lust, not ego, not possessiveness, not jealousy, not dependence. ~ Rajneesh

Yabu-san's a violent man with no scruples whatsoever. He honors nothing but his own interests. Duty, loyalty, tradition, mean nothing to him. His mind has flashes of great cunning, even brilliance. He's equally dangerous as ally or enemy.' 'All commendable virtues. What's to be said against him?' 'A ~ James Clavell

It's rare for the studios to find a filmmaker who wants to make a family film. To find someone that has an idea, embraces it, has kids and wants to make something exciting - well, they don't see that too often. ~ Robert Rodriguez

In the almost film-like flitting-by of modern life, a man needs something to tell him, from time to time, that he is still himself, and nothing can give him this assurance in so comforting a manner as the "four feet trotting behind". ~ Konrad Lorenz

My main objective is to be professional but to kill him. ~ Mike Tyson

From an actor's point of view, you never really like to hope that anything will go beyond the pilot. I'd always say to my agent every time I filmed a pilot, 'Great! Well, I'll see you at pilot season.' ~ Owain Yeoman