Pawel Pawlikowski Quotes

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'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?

My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I'm a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, 'Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!' and I took that as a great compliment. That's exactly my intention.

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.

I'm not into digital marketing, downloading, or streaming - I've always been a man of the theaters.

If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.

When someone goes to watch my film in the theatre, they won't remember the last four articles they read about me. Instead, they will think about the last film I did.

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.

Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.

A film like 'The Sixth Sense' burns an image of who you are into people's minds.

There is no good or bad cinema, there are films that connect either less or more with audience.

I like to go to the movies and watch characters who make me question how I see the world.

The wonderful thing about cinema is you can bring a 3D world to life.

I would like to do films where I will be remembered after people leave the theatres.

People have a very short attention span when it comes to television, but nobody forgets the movie you do.

I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.

When I go the cinema, unfortunately nowadays, especially with the big commercial films, the audience is spoon-fed through the entire experience and they don't have to do any work.

I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.

The films that I go to see at the cinema are not Hollywood blockbusters particularly. I've not got anything against them... I'm in them! But I don't go and spend my money on them.

For me a film is at its best when you can start filling in the story with your own life experience.

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about.

With a time-based medium like theater or film, you can't have the audience getting restless in their seats. They're stuck there on their bums; you have to pay enormous attention to pace and you can't lose your way.

When you know you made a film that people are going to watch, that's just really awesome; you know you did it for something, you know you shot a film for people to watch it.

What drives me is what I'm putting out into the world, and I like to make films that people can connect to, or they can escape in.