Yann Martel Quotes

I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvelous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a 'cinematic' dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality.

We go to movies to be taken away to another place, to be dazzled, to dream, to hopefully be filled with wonder. The design of the world and the look of the film is all in service of trying to create that feeling of wonder in the audience.

I think a film is a failure if it doesn't have an emotional effect. That's the film's failure. Not if it doesn't deliver a message, but if it doesn't have emotional effect or visceral effect.

Cinema has the capacity to be so physiological.

I know when I go to a movie I want to experience something, whether to laugh, to cry, to feel bad.

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

Words have great cumulative power, but in the 21st century, a single image is much stronger. An image suggests the unvarnished truth. That is its power and its fiction.

I'm interested in the impact my movies have on people and how it affects them, and what they like and what they don't like - and what they take away from it. What leaves an impression, you know?

The stage is suspension of disbelief. Film is a literal medium.

I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.

I think that the cinema is a physical thing. What I'm looking for is creating a physical shock with the audience. I don't care of the meaning. I don't care of the idea. I don't want to say something. I want to make a 'shock physique.'

I want films to haunt an audience, to give them something to remember and be able to talk about.

I wanted to make people feel the same way I feel when I see a good movie.

Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience.

I don't know any form of art or entertainment that can affect people the way movies can. I know it sounds ridiculous, but they can change your world. They can change your views.

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.

Creating a character is about what they look like. The look speaks volume to the audience.

There's such an immediate intimacy with film that you just don't get in theater.

My personal feeling is that ultra-high frame rates and ultra-vivid giant screen movies can be like a window onto reality. And if you recognize it as such, you can write your screenplay, direct your movie, edit it, and present it as a live experience - not like a movie.

Pictures bring you inside, whether you see yourself driving a new car or as a hapless prisoner who is being abused.

I don't know, I always had an active dream life, and there's something so profound and wonderful about a movie. It's so alive. It's so shared. The thing of sitting in an audience and going into a dream-like state with several hundred other people that are sharing exactly what you're feeling is a profound event.

Since I started as an actress in the film industry, I realised the power of visuals and how that can fuel the imagination of our mind. It is very powerful. Therefore, I always cater to my own sensibility first and then to the world.

Cinema has to move people.