Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

I like when you watch a film and you feel like you're a part of somebody's life for an hour and a half.

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.

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

Cinema never saved anyone's life, it is not a medicine that will save anyone's life. It is only an aspirin.

When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience.

Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about.

I love films where you go into the cinema and loosen the edges of yourself and you hopefully enter into the world of the film. You're watching something unfold before you. I prefer the idea of wonder or intense wonder over shock or something.

There are all these great TV series; you can watch all these hours and hours of shows and ideas, but there's still something great about a movie that unfolds in a couple of hours, and you have the complete experience.

Cinema is empathy machinery, and we multiply our life experience through cinema. When it is good cinema, it almost counts as a personal experience.

I love the movies. Everyone always says the same thing about the shared cultural experience, seeing things on the big screen, the church of the cinema... But on top of all that, as a filmmaker, I love having people be trapped in a movie theater, forcing them to watch what I made.

I've always enjoyed film, but I'm a little afraid of it because I think it is very powerful as a medium. You have the visuals, the sound, the colors, all of these things coming at you, and they transport you physically so it becomes this surround sound, virtual reality.

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

I read tons of books, listen to music non-stop, watch as many movies as possible, catch a play when I can, art shows, concerts, bar talks - I just try to engage in art, which to me is everywhere, as often as I can because narrative lives in it all.

Whatever films I make, the mandate is that it should touch the audiences and engage them from the first scene.

I think people go to the movies to be entertained, to have an experience, to disappear from their own reality for a couple of hours. If the film truly succeeds in everything the filmmaker sets out for it to be, then it's elevated to art. It's elevated to something special, because it gives people a visceral feeling of something they're experiencing as a collective group. You feel something and that's what turns it into what you may call art.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.

Cinema is movement, after all.

I'm curious and you know, I really think cinema is strong medium that allows you to go to so many different mental countries, not just geographical countries. As far as it allows me to express something of my own truth, it's fine for me. I can go to the moon.

I love cinema. I think the risk of the aesthetics being fixed is compensated by other advantages. Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

In movies, you can basically buy the audience into the theater. If you spend enough money on visual effects, even if you are lacking in story and character, you might still pull it off.

I believe the cinema is one of our principal forms of art. It is an incredibly powerful way to tell uplifitng stories that can move people to cry with joy and inspire them to reach for the stars.

Movies are the greatest art form the world has come up with yet. If you don't use them to the full extent and you don't give people as much as you possibly can, you're doing a disservice to it.

Cinema through spectacle, through the entertainment of spectacle, tells the story of many actual problems in life. Because who ever doesn't want to read between the lines can just enjoy the entertainment and the show and can go home happy.

I've seen films that have made as much as $100, $200 million, but they're not films. They're images. They're flashes. They're many beautiful images, lots of things to look at. They capture you. But it's not a film. It's not something that involves you in a story. They go to cinema now to be blown away by the effects.