Barry Levinson Quotes

Cinema is still a very young art form with extraordinary techniques and very impressive special effects but sometimes it seems the soul has been taken out of things.

Film is very condensed.

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.

Certain things work on paper held together with staples. Comics use bright colors to make things leap off the page, but movies are a different medium.

I want to do films that provide entertainment, but are also content-driven.

I enjoy films like 'American Beauty' and want to do similar films that reflect our culture.

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

You can write a little and can draw a little, but there's necessarily a limitation on both in a comic strip, since it appears in such a tiny space.

In my opinion, the motion picture is the greatest medium of expression ever invented. It embraces all the other arts. The films that have the greatest unity, the greatest overall strength, and give the most satisfaction to the viewer, have been those in which a guiding hand was imposed in every section of the film's many divisions.

Everybody is always trying to make the best movie they can. It's a process.

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.

In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting.

I am fortunate enough to have worked on, and continue to work on, evolutionary movies in all formats from just simple good story telling, which still matters most of all, to CG movies to tent-pole size 3D movies, and genre 3D movies like 'Piranha 3D.'

I do enjoy film. The more I do it the more I learn.

I found it very difficult to explain to someone why you did a film. It's not like having a conversation.

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

Part of what's so tricky in a film that's two hours long is how many themes can you effectively explore.

I don't have this crazy dream about going to Hollywood, because I really love to watch movies and do movies that are complicated, and I want more strange things and complicated things.

I'm just glad I got to work with the likes of Spielberg.

There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.

It's only the filmmaker. The script is really, really second. And there's a huge gap between filmmaker and script for me. I almost don't care about the story that they're telling; I really only care about who wants to tell it.

I would like to explore comedy, I want to do more theatre, and I definitely want a future in film. I love science-fiction.

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

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