Michael Caine Quotes

I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures and I guess I am committed to it for life.

I’m not being cynical, but when you’re doing a movie you have a number of choices as an actor. Then you see it all cut together and all of those precious little pieces you put in are maybe on the cutting room floor. So, you don’t have that much control. You have very little control, in fact.

Well, as far as film, either you're making a film or you're making videos. Digital capture is always trying to emulate the range and look of film. I believe personally that film has more.

Everybody who worked in film misses holding pieces of film, holding it up to the light, and seeing exactly where something was image-wise.

Boy, I'd hate to shoot on tape or disc or whatever the hell they're talking about. I love film.

It's near impossible to make a movie in black and white in the system.

For behaviorist films, that's been much more useful - the change of technology - but for my kind of films, doing them on film is much better, because it's more beautiful.

I think digital is getting so much better. It's harder and harder to make the argument now for film. All things being equal, though, I still prefer to capture on film.

There are people who've told me cinema is a visual medium and you don't need to say so much. When I write the script, all these lines of what the characters are thinking are written. Once the film is shot and the lines are dubbed, I tone it down in postproduction if I feel it gets heavy.

Digital is great; I see the benefits and beauty in both formats. But it doesn't give you that organic quality that celluloid brings.

A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.

When you are shooting over a period of six months, you tend to forget how dark or bright it was. And when you are using different technologies, having a look book helps during the final grading of the film. So you can design what the film is going to look like even before the colouring process begins.

The editing process, to use a slightly grim analogy, is like the slow suffocation of lots of babies. It's like, which finger do you want to cut off first?

Film is lies at twenty-four frames a second.

If you didn't get it right and then you have to release a director's cut to undo what the studio made you release, I don't know, either it's some marketing thing for them to get more money or the director didn't do his job.

I think maybe making films is something innate you can't really teach to begin with.

As a director, when you cut scenes from a movie, you do it with the idea that it is making the story move forward and progress. Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

Film is definitely a director's medium. They're responsible for the look and everything, and you're a part of that process as an actor, and you try to contribute to the story. But I think it might sound a little pretentious for me to say I think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a creative person.

The process of making films is so technically demanding that it's a distraction. You don't spend your time thinking about the philosophical content, which is often very depressing.

The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.

Otherwise [digital revolution] hasn't changed my way of filmmaking, I'm not nostalgic in postulating we should still make films on celluloid. I love celluloid but I don't need to continue on celluloid.

I learned very quickly that the hard thing in life is to make good films. Technically, filmmaking is the camera and the actor telling the story and that's what I'm more interested in doing.

I'm a film geek man. I love toys. I love everything in filmmaking, so for me to just be around this technology is just so cool to watch it being used for the first time, some of the stuff.

I still love the layers of cinema whether it's 35mm or 16mm or 8mm, super 8 which I love. I love the grain. If I had my druthers I'd film everything in kodachrome.

I always say writing is like dreaming, shooting is like living, and editing is like murder, because you take all these gifts that actors give you, and you cut them.