Neil Jordan Quotes

It's not simply that British films do well at the box office and generate revenue, it's that they provide a window to the world of what Britain and its culture is about.

Hollywood is a reflection of a general climate that we live in.

Music is always a reflection of what's going on in the hearts and minds of the culture.

Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.

But what I'm very interested in, whether it's writing, whether it's hosting a show, whether it's cooking food, I'm just into the discussions of identity, culture and the politics of culture.

A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.

A few words of Hindi appear here or there, but it's all Urdu. I feel that if the popular culture, which is what Hindi films are, uses Urdu, it's not going to diminish.

Burmese authors and artists can play the role that artists everywhere play. They help to mold the outlook of a society - not the whole outlook, and they are not the only ones to mold the outlook of society, but they have an important role to play there.

I would say that no film is apolitical. There are politics in all films. Any film that is anchored in a society, any film that deals with humanity is necessarily political.

Every era needs a genre through which it understands itself.

The entertainment industry is vast and is a reflection of the society we live in.

When Americans shoot movies they aim at the entire planet. When the French make movies, they aim at Paris.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well.

For me, it's just about keeping the standards up. We're a small country, so we have to punch above our weight. I'm not a great man for doing something just because it's Irish, and you never know what's going to work. But as long as we keep the standards up, people will continue to invest in films. It's as simple as that.

Previously the same Polish audiences would have been pressured into seeing cinema made for adults, films made by us about those spheres of life that were significant for us and which should be significant for our society.

You have to be respectful of pop culture, because people interpret it in the way they want.

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is in the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.

Popular culture is most powerful when it offers us a vision of how our society should look - or at least reproduces our reality.

From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).

I want to be able to bring out stories like 'Verna,' as well as stories which are of the modern and new generation like 'Ho Mann Jahaan,' which is a film I did of the youth of Pakistan.

The movie [Miral] is not pro-Palestinian. It's about Palestinians. It's a Palestinian story, written by a Palestinian person. I don't know anybody else that could have done that

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.

If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?