Sam Neill Quotes

When you do a film as unique and original as 'Napoleon Dynamite,' it's hard then try to repeat what audiences loved the first time.

When people want to see your film, you're over the moon because you've actually made real contact. That's something very special.

A film should be an experience. You should feel something. It should motivate you to feel something.

It's awesome to see something like 'Inception', which is just mind-blowing and amazing, and it actually resonates with the audiences. I feel like that's rare.

I think the thing that is meaningful is when I can tell that someone's been affected by the movie or by anything I made.

I loved 'Junebug.' It was one of my favorite films, my favorite type of film.

'Scarface,' I remember going to see that with my father. We didn't know what to expect; we did not know what to expect. I was a kid, and my father took me, and we didn't leave. It was so disturbing, but we loved it.

I was 15 or 16 when I first saw 'Once Upon A Time In America,' so I was quite young, but I was completely blown away.

When I watch a film, I watch it as an audience instead of thinking as an actor or an intellectual. I see whether it made me laugh, get involved or shocked me at certain points. Something has to stir inside me.

I loved it, it's such fun. I like that people are seeing it and then talking about it. Like when I took my son and his friends to see Napoleon Dynamite last year, we spent the next six weeks trying to explain it.

You find movies when you need them. They may not always be the best films, but they speak to you.

I've also shot plenty of films with very small audiences - 'The Sun Also Rises.' I love that film, but I didn't capture the imagination of the audience. I don't know why.

It's wonderful to be part of a film that really reaches an audience's mind and an audience's heart.

'Premam' moved me; it was almost like seeing life play out on screen.

Cinema has to move people.

If it is a good film, the audience will like it. They will take to it if it is made with a certain amount of integrity.

At heart, we believe that the films that work well are the films that do touch people emotionally.

It's always hard to explain why an audience ultimately responds to a movie.

It's interesting, for me sappy means sentimental and something that gets you in your heart, gets you emotional. That's what I mean. Also, of course, it means that I'm slightly setting up the audience that there's a bit of fun involved, as well.

Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.

I want to tell stories which require something of an audience, by way of thought, argument, emotion, because I'm more often in an audience than I am a maker of films, and that's the kind of movie I want to see.

In a world where there are no longer books we have almost all of us read, the movies we have almost all of us seen are perhaps the richest cultural bond we have. They go on haunting us for years the way our dreams go on haunting us. In a way they are our dreams. The best of them remind us of human truths that would not seem as true without them. They help to remind us that we are all of us humans together.

I've never watched my films with an everyday audience so it was really crazy to watch people clap at the end of my film - with no one there, no actors, no people from the film. It was just a spontaneous reaction, so I thought that was probably the best compliment you could get from an audience.

True movies will never be measured by how much they make - they'll be measured by how they make you feel.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're as a filmmaker really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart. That's what people will do, people will naturally tear stuff apart because they're trapped with it, they paid money for it. And they came into it wanting to love it. So all you can really do is piss off the audience. Unless you do things right.