Kathryn Bigelow Quotes

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

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

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 want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.

The big thing for me is to make films that you feel, whether you feel happy, whether you feel sad, whether you feel sick; it's to make the audience feel so that the next day they remember what they saw.

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.

People are mistaken to view cinema as some sort of gimmick. It's very much ingrained in the ways in which we understand each other.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

Movies alone have the hideous capacity to do everything for you. So in directing movies, you have to figure how to leave things out - because when you leave things out, you evoke the imaginative participation of the audience.

A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

Film can be more of a reality than a page with words can ever be.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

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.

Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.

Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.

My duty is to try to reach beauty. Cinema is emotion. When you laugh you cry.

I wanted to make a film that was sophisticated and emotional, but for a wider audience.

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.

That's what film can do in a way that TV and other long-form storytelling can't. It gives you this very immersive moment.

The interesting thing about movies, it's not always - y'know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.

I think cinema has this beautiful component. It's a universal language.

It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.