Zadie Smith Quotes

You can sometimes break rules in comics that you can't necessarily break in cinema. It's fun to find something cool in a comic and then try and find a way to break the same rule in another medium.

My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility.

I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story.

Ultimately, as a director, you try and tell people where to look, but unlike film or television, where you force them to look at something, you can't control it completely.

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!

The only thing I can ever do is make a film that I can respond to. I could not make a romantic comedy for college girls. I wouldn't know how that works.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

If the audience, in minute 50, is thinking about the way a movie is shot, there's a problem. I want it to permeate emotionally.

Wrestling is like any form of drama or pretty much any form of entertainment - some people understand this about forms of entertainment really intuitively when they're younger, and others would have to be really not very intelligent for a long time until we realize that every human mood is an art.

The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images.

The real problem is arranging that experience in a way that tells a story, which is just incredible enough to be interesting, but credible enough to be believed.

I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.

A film has its own life and takes its own time.

When I watch a film I get swept away. I don't really watch the camera.

Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.

It never ceases to amaze me that readers who are willing to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the motivation of a vicious serial killer get high and mighty because I have put a coffee shop where there isn't one. Er... it's a novel. I made one up. I'm allowed to make stuff up. I'd go as far as to suggest that I make stuff up for a living.

Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.

If you have something to say, a movie is a really great medium to say it. It doesn't matter what the message is.

Film as a medium, like a novel as a medium, possesses a unique ability to communicate. Film is capable of communicating in a way that no other medium can, and I would say the same for the novel.

I was swept by the narrative structure of film... you can create a world, you can destroy it, you can do what you want with it and serve it to people just the way you like.

When you make a film, you realize that the audience will be powerless to stop it or flip back to refresh their memories or skip the boring parts. They are at the mercy of your storytelling.

I think, in a film that's supposed to last an hour and a half, I think you have to really pay attention to what kind of movie you're making, what is the audience experiencing, and does this joke fit with this joke?

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.

As a reader and as a viewer, usually when I watch a movie, I'm caught up enough in the movie that I'm not breaking it down to the details anyway.

The idea of having a narrative guiding the viewer through and grasping their attention is a really compelling thing.