David Copperfield Quotes

Magic in cinema is a bit like ventriloquism on the radio.

So, when the special effects are at the service of the story and draw you into it, that is really the magic.

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

Magicians will always tell you the trick is the most important thing, but I'm more interested in telling a story.

I don't want to see the zipper in the back of the monster suit. Like everybody else who goes to the movies, I want to believe the monster is real.

Like when you go to a magic show and you know how they do the illusions. That's how I am when I watch any movies where they have people flying through the air.

I like to direct for the big screen.

When I was a little kid - and even still - I loved magic tricks. When I saw how movies got made - at least had a glimpse when I went on the Universal Studios tour with my grandfather, I remember feeling like this was another means by which I could do magic.

The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it's all in the story.

I liked the idea of having actual magic performed as stage magic, so you could assume that it was just a trick, that something is all smoke and mirrors, but there's that, like, feeling at the back of your mind: What if it's not?

When you see 'Lord of the Rings,' you want to feel like you've been dropped into it and that you're part of it. You don't want to be aware of how it's being done; you just want it to feel really seamless.

I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.

When I made 'Real Steel,' the director actually had the robots in the monitor, so he knew where everything was. So technically, there's been advancements. But at the end of the day, movies are about story and characters, so all the other stuff is great, but unless you have those two elements, then you've got nothing.

If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema.

I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

As long as you don't think about the whole big picture, producing 'Spider-Man' is a fantastic experience.

No other aspect of filmmaking has tempted me to do a film other than the script and the story itself.

If a fantasy, if a story can help you feel something, I think that's really cool.

Our ethos for 'Now You See Me 2' was that everything in the movie at least had the potential to be done in real life, and I'd say over 90% of it was actually done in-camera with no CGI. Of course, movies like this are always going to be bound by the rules of Hollywood, being there's going to be enhancements of CGI.

The effects that interest me are not the guy flying through the sky, but creating reality - reality that you otherwise can't go and shoot.

Everyone knows that a movie is false. But if as filmmakers we give the audience too many reasons to lose the suspension of disbelief, I believe we're working our way down a hole.

A novel is both a story and a piece of writing. A movie is a story and a piece of filmmaking.

The CGI landscape is another world. It has its own physical laws; it can defy gravity. But surely the wonder of cinematic space is that it is wedded to reality?

Imagining things are there that are not really there, with the green screen, is very much like theatre, when you're looking at the fourth wall.