Prosenjit Chatterjee Quotes

When it comes to remaking my own films in the English language, I can only imagine that it is a very boring process, I wouldn't ever dream of it.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

Film-makers should remain true to their principles and never compromise, there is a real revival in the British film industry but there is a danger that we will become colonial servants of Hollywood. We need to maintain our own integrity.

You take some creative license when you make a movie, and things can be a little bit different.

I am comfortable in my space in Punjabi cinema.

The problem with most Hollywood movies is they don't give the director enough control.

I played Othello, but I didn't sit around thinking how Laurence Olivier did it when he played it. That wouldn't do me any good.

I wanted to make films that were culturally relevant in my own country, that challenged people, and that people talked about.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

Do I feel that white directors have to tell only white stories? No. Do I feel that black filmmakers should only tell stories about black people? No. If we say that, then that means Asian people cannot write about anybody but Asians. I don't think a woman should only write about women.

I think plays deserve other interpretations. They should live on, and other people should should take their hand at them. I'm very supportive of that.

I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.

I've been sort of spoiled on the TV end because HBO feels like a small institution making independent movies. There's respect for the director's contribution in a way that mainstream television doesn't really reflect, I don't think.

In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I'm not.

I have nothing against crossing over, but I don't need to change to cross over.

For the theatrical experience to survive, spectacle films need to expand their definition of what they can be. They need to be unique and true voices of the filmmakers behind them. They can't just be copying what came before them.

Films should involve a director's idiosyncrasies as much as possible I think.

I respect Malayalam films the same way I respect Bengali films. I think Malayalam films have not compromised on the essence and have kept their own statement and are coming up with very good themes.

Thank God for jazz. It gave black women what film and theater gave white women: a well-lighted space where they could play with roles and styles, conduct esthetic experiments and win money and praise.

We are - as artists, we are racialized through genre and called black - without being called black - through genre.

After 'Gangaajal,' I did not take another Hindi film and shifted focus to Marathi cinema.

I would love to do regional cinema, provided the role is exciting enough and artistically challenging.

I don't like post-modernism. It's cynical, and takes no discipline - you just copy. It doesn't allow a film to be open to reality.

I think of Westernized culture as a good visual for my music.

A lot of theatre people are definitely not conservative, but I don't think liberals get to own the culture.