Bob Greene Quotes

To me, movies are valuable as an art form and as a wonderful means of popular entertainment. But I think movies have gone terribly wrong.

If you're working on a movie, you want it to be projected on the largest tapestry possible, and the sound to be perfect, and for that kind of communal experience of the movies to take place for it.

As filmmakers, we want the audience to have the most complete experience they can. For example, I interviewed Stanley Kubrick years ago around the time of '2001: A Space Odyssey.' I was going to see the film that night in London, and he insisted I sit in one of four seats in the theater for the best view or not watch the film.

It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.

There are some stories - not even stories, some feelings - that you can't accomplish in cinema without using celluloid.

I don't think I've succeeded in making any really good films. There are moments, scenes, whole movements that sing. It has all added up to a cinema of sorts, even though I'm still learning my art.

It doesn't matter whether you shoot on celluloid or on digital, you better make a good film.

I had a love for photography, which of course rolled into cinematography.

The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.

Maybe I should stay a good soldier of cinema.

Movies are details. Movies are billions of details that come into a certain moment. So with all the years and months and weeks and days and minutes of preparation, then finally you're shooting and it all comes down to these moments when you're shooting, which is sort of insane when you think about it. The details make a difference.

In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.

I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.

Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.

One of the wonderful things about making a film of any genre is that you have dialogue. You can take up a position. If you want to say something about your position, you can just say it. You don't have to spend massive amounts of screen time.

In my mind, there isn't as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.

I think directing is a huge responsibility and it's not something where you can just be like, "Yeah, sure, I'll give it a go!" I think it's something you really need to focus on, and put a lot of effort and attention into.

There’s always been this hocus-pocus or magical, mystical thing associated with the making of film that sort of psyches people out and makes them think that this cannot be done; that this is a craft that cannot be learned.

As the acting class was going on, I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I love movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.

I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

I've ended up as a filmmaker who really loves the movie part of movies. That time in my life was a big influence on the kind of movies that I ended up making. I always think I'm going to make a movie that's gritty and real, but then I make a movie that's like an opera. I fight it at first and then that's just the way it is.

I'd love to direct, and I think I'd be a great director, but... I've been approved by the studio to direct, which I think is a cool jump of faith for them. Or proof that they're really stupid. But I don't think so.

People say to me, "You make fantastic films" and I say, "No, I make documentaries.

I don't think all films should necessarily look like they do on digital video. I think it cheats the audience, at some point. If you try to make an epic and you shoot it digitally, that doesn't make much sense. I think there's a certain kind of film that could be a "digital film." But it shouldn't be interchangeable with other films. It should be something more than just a capture medium. It should be a different form altogether, something new.