Noel Clarke Quotes

Action roles - or any role - should go to the best guy for the job. People obsess about nationality. Hollywood and America might be the hub for pop culture and cinema for the Western world, but that shouldn't suggest that all the roles should go to young American men.

I had to choose between American and British actors, and it didn't take me more than a second to decide: Russians are Europeans and should be played by other Europeans.

So many people from the West are coming into India, all the studios have come into India, and they're making films here, whether that's Fox, Warner Bros, Disney, everyone. That stands as testament for us, so why are we afraid of sharing our talent with the world? We must.

I was shocked when I moved to Sydney how very few indigenous people I came across. And so when I go to places like Maroubra or Redfern or Waterloo or Erskineville, I feel more at home because of the people I'm around - anywhere I can see a face that reflects someone that looks like my family, I feel much more at home.

The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.

The box office has become global. I think that factors in to the question of how to portray different ethnicities and cultures.

Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.

It's because we are so flooded with American culture that we're startled when we see ourselves up there on the screen.

And why is our music called world music? I think people are being polite. What they want to say is that it's third world music. Like they use to call us under developed countries, now it has changed to developing countries, it's much more polite.

I think it's important that nobody forgets that although Hollywood commercially dominates the world cinema, in fact what comes out of the filmmaking here is only a tiny slice out of the massive amount of operation that goes on around the world.

I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well.

I am lucky that the Western world chooses me to play roles in their movies an television, whatever language it may be.

I like reflecting the culture I understand best, spotting the idiosyncrasies of British people and revealing them to an audience in a way that amuses is what I find fun.

I've always found it strange that a director can hire any designer he wants from any country. But if he hires a foreign actor, it's like he's stolen the crown jewels and run across the river with them.

The business is so international now; you'll be working on an American film, and you'll start chatting to someone, and it's like: 'Oh, you're English, too.'

If African film makers had one-tenth the amount commanded by film makers the world over - even the amount used by so-called shoestring film makers - I think we would see quite an explosion of African films on the world scene.

I look forward to the day when indigenous actors can play Hamlet and Ophelia and not just Othello and Desdemona.

African-Americans are always forced to learn the other culture, but the other culture is not forced to learn ours. I went to acting school at Juilliard, and we learned Shakespeare and Shaw, but we never did the work of a single African-American playwright, not August Wilson or Ntozake Shange or Imir Baraka.

The Sundance Institute has been vital to the film communities of Latin America.

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

I was actually cut out of 'L.A. Story'... and rightfully so.

There's something that people misunderstand about screen quotas. It's not about rejecting or hating other countries' films, but about protecting our domestic film industry.

The great joy of doing 'The Daily Show' for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I'm playing the brown guy, and sometimes I'm not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.

I wanted to do - there was this film called 'Magic' that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don't want any comedians in this.

I finally, you know, moved to Mexico City, where the film industry is. I started working there as a producer, which is a very, very valid thing for women to do, because we always produce for men, right?