Matthew Modine Quotes

I love it when television is shot in a cinematic way and I think to aspire to that is no bad thing.

With today's fast films, you can light the way your eye sees the scene. You can abuse the film and create subtleties in contrast with light and exposure, diffusion and filters. That's what makes it an art.

You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.

I've enjoyed the singular focus of not going back and forth between the two mediums. It isn't about the screen size so much as film being where the stories I'm most interested in telling happen to be at.

It's hard to go back to shooting contemporary apartment interiors after you shoot something like 'Mudbound.'

Directing is a tremendous art.

I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.

I always loved experimenting in film.

I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

It was very hard to make 'Funny Face' in Paris because making movies is difficult and making a movie in a city that was glorious, that was unique and surprising, to get it, to put it on film you have to make choices and reject a lot of things so you're always wondering: 'Am I doing it right?'

There's the movie you write, there's the movie you shoot and the movie you edit, and often, you find that you're getting the same information out of a scene that you already have and a scene that's actually more powerful, so you have to make the tough decision to take it out.

As with instant replay, NFL Films' use of slow motion, camera angles and the narration of Facenda was not just a technical breakthrough but a conceptual breakthrough.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

One of the problems I have with a lot of movies these days is that everything is too well lit. In the world of digital creations there is a tendency to show too much.

I really wanted to write the way Kubrick makes films - 'Strangelove,' '2001', 'Clockwork Orange', 'Barry Lyndon' - they're all so different.

I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.

Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that.

Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.

Film allows me to ask some really big questions with the time to explore them deeply. I love the form.

TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.

I began to learn about the camera and the actors. That gave me a lot of the skills. At the same time, advertising gives you a lot of vices, for example, an obsession for a superficial look, but at the same time, it gives you the capacity to synthesize the story - tell a story in one minute.

I don't study films particularly. I plan to direct, but I'm not watching film - I watch the entire film to see how the story goes, but I don't say, 'Oh, so he does a slow pan here, or he pulls here, watch the crane shot, or look at the composition,' because it's got to be my eye.

The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.

We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments.