Zhang Ziyi Quotes

I love that you can watch a film and 10 years later still be affected.

My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.

I love films that make me react emotionally and physically when you walk out of the cinema. Two of my favorite films however have got to be 'The Tree Of Life' and 'The Piano Teacher,' which also stars one of my favourite actresses Isabelle Huppert.

I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?

I love drama. Drama is, like, my thing. I want a movie that will move something inside me, that's going to shift something and keep me thinking.

For me, there is nothing more valuable than how people feel in a movie theater about a movie.

'The Joy Luck Club' is not a perfect film. But, I distinctly remember watching it with my mom - and bursting into tears after the screening!

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Loving a film is like falling in love with a woman or with a man like you never expect it. It it's not the one you think you will be in love with, you know. You think always that he will be with a beard, and black, and big and finally he's Chinese and you know it's the same thing. There's something very organic about the film and if you forgot it, if you don't have this seed in it...this organic flavor in it the film doesn't work it's wrong.

As a breath of wind or some echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns to the source from which it issued, so the stream of beauty passes back into its possessor through his eyes, which is its natural route to the soul; arriving there and setting him all aflutter, it waters the passages of the feathers and causes the wings to grow, and fills the soul of the loved one in his turn with love.

I touched emotions I've never tapped in my entire life. I've heard people say, 'I hope this movie doesn't glamorise drugs.

What you care about [movie] is whether it's moving you, or whether you're caught up in it.

The kind of sermon which is likely to break the hearer's heart is that which first has broken the preacher's heart, and the sermon which is likely to reach the heart of the hearer is the one which has come straight from the heart of the preacher.

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'

I'll be honest: 'Badlands' changed my life: it really did rewire my brain as to how film can operate.

I'd rather have Ben Affleck feeling something than twenty minutes of punching CGI Zod. You want moments that resonate with your audience.

It never ceases to amaze me how art can touch and inspire people.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

I don't think it's right to define films as commercial or art house. What's important is that a film evokes a certain emotion when it's being watched.

Movies have heart. Have mind. Have power. Have ambition.

A film that can be described in words is not really a film.

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.

If you can't feel then why did you kiss me? Because I can feel it here, in my heart.

I do write songs about love but I don't really know love that well.

Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard.