Alain Resnais Quotes

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that's humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.

Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

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

In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

I wanted to make a film that was sophisticated and emotional, but for a wider audience.

My position was that the film begins with the first frame and that the film should be doing a job at that point.

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.

Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.

My father's films are often very slow for the modern audiences, which are used to a lot of editing. It's the audience that watches the film instead of the director dictating the reaction he wants from you.

I don't believe moviegoers don't have patience. Screenwriters are told a scene can't be longer than three minutes, that you have to cut to the chase. Not true!

People use location as a language in films, and Quentin uses action as a language in his films. There's really not a lot of violence. It's more of an emotional beat than it is a physical beat.

My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That's what directors are, they're storytellers because they're directing where your focus is going to be as an audience.

A film engages you emotionally and intellectually.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

I tend not to be so attracted to films that force me into an intellectual place over an emotional one.

Film is built for kinetic movement and crash and burn. It's a great tool for spectacles. But if it's not rooted to something a little higher, you're just kicking your butt around the corner. You can only take so much of that. You have to have some sort of foundation to explode from.

I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

Film is an emotional medium; it's not a logical medium. It's not an intellectual medium, so every decision you make as a filmmaker and an actor has to be emotional in some way, even in the rejection of logic.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.