John Hillcoat Quotes

The select group of people who do make realistic cinema, who do make cinema perhaps a little more acceptable to the Western audience, is a very small percentage.

It's amazing what you can do without in terms of filmmaking when a story is really important.

I mean, '8½' to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act of filmmaking and creativity.

There's something very dreamlike about film, and I will always be very fascinated by that, and I'm always tempted to go in that direction.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

I am interested in seeing if you can create on film pieces that feel contemporary and urgent.

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.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.

Film in many ways is very literal.

Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.

A film engages you emotionally and intellectually.

I think the form, the Hollywood movie, I think the quality is obviously always going to be there and I think that the question of taste, there's always a question of taste.

Movies are too literal.

Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day.

Agnes Varda changed my view of cinema; she directs from an artistic point of view, and a film is most of all the expression of an artistic director. I learnt to enter the world and the imagination of a director.

Movies are art and the spirit of the movie depends on the creators.

I think there's a connection with 'Nightcrawler' and 'Blowup' and other films where visual imagery is integral to the story. It allows you to play with images.

The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

I live, therefore I make films. I make film, therefore I live. Life. Movement. I make home movies, therefore I live. I live, therefore I make home movies.

I think cinema has this beautiful component. It's a universal language.

Movies aren't just supposed to be a representation of reality. They're supposed to be an art.

Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.

Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.

I don't think you can figure this stuff out. If you could figure all this stuff out, then all the great filmmakers would come out of Yale and Harvard. It's not an intellectual process.