James L. Brooks Quotes

A film engages you emotionally and intellectually.

A lot of times, you finish a movie, and you're either going, 'Oh, thank God, that's over,' or 'Oh, my God, it's over, and I don't want it to end.'

Frank Miller is more of a visionary than any director I've ever worked with, and he achieves that vision better than anyone I've ever worked with.

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

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

For me, Fellini was like a watermelon. It is there. A watermelon cannot die.

Kubrick showed us something special. Every film was a challenge, and a direct assault on cinema's conventions.

I think a movie is a media that is evoking feelings.

Movies have been my way to get out of my backyard. I'm trying to let people know that movies change people's lives.

Has Werner Herzog ever said anything that wasn't true? What a brilliant fountain of wisdom. Everything he touches I'm just fascinated by.

I love films, I love the way they make me feel.

For 120 minutes, 'Birdman' floats from comedy to surrealism to high drama to quiet brilliance. I felt so inspired by watching this movie. It reaches for the sky and never comes back down to earth.

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

I don't think it's right to define films as commercial or art house. What's important is that a film evokes a certain emotion when it's being watched.

My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.

Movies are the greatest art form the world has come up with yet. If you don't use them to the full extent and you don't give people as much as you possibly can, you're doing a disservice to it.

I had always been affected by films, as well, of course - and great films.

Sitting in the movie theater watching "Star Wars," I've never had an experience with any form of entertainment that was like that. It was almost spiritual. I couldn't believe that someone's mind created that. And, right, it felt like George Lucas had a piano that was playing my emotions, and he could go ahead and do whatever he wanted and make me lean forward if he wanted, or he could make me go oh, or he could make me hide my face.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.

I don't think all films should necessarily look like they do on digital video. I think it cheats the audience, at some point. If you try to make an epic and you shoot it digitally, that doesn't make much sense. I think there's a certain kind of film that could be a "digital film." But it shouldn't be interchangeable with other films. It should be something more than just a capture medium. It should be a different form altogether, something new.

But rather that we should lose our sense that neither can become the other, that the traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lense and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.

Robert Vavra is one of these artists, part magician, part alchemist, who is able to create a series of photographs in unforgettable compositions. Only visible are the dunes, the blinding fields of flowers and the vast sky, the epic intimacy of Robert Vavra's vision.

I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.