Alfonso Cuaron Quotes

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

All movies assault the viewer in one way or another.

I tend not to be so attracted to films that force me into an intellectual place over an emotional one.

Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

All great cinema has the sense of the dynamic, the transitional, mixed with the mythical and the sense of ritual.

Filmmaking is about moments. In real life, things might take six months, a year, but [in filmmaking] you have to create the moment where it happened.

Language is much closer to film than painting is.

I know when I go to a movie I want to experience something, whether to laugh, to cry, to feel bad.

Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.

I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person.

The written word can be powerful and beautiful - but films transport us to another place in a way that even the most evocative words never can.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvelous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a 'cinematic' dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality.

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

If the audience, in minute 50, is thinking about the way a movie is shot, there's a problem. I want it to permeate emotionally.

At least I want to be making films that are somehow born out of me that are stories I want to tell. The challenge is figuring out how to do it where you can make them personal, yet still deliver to an audience a film experience that is satisfying and emotional, and that's what I'm trying to do.

I always loved watching movies because I loved what certain moments inside of films did to me.

Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.

I love film - it's like painting.

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.

There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I'd really like to do that.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.