Japanese Cinema Quotes

One Missed Call,' it was regarded as a mainstream film for my career because it was big budget and filmed in Japan and it really opened wide in Japan, it did really well commercially. So I was really surprised.

I remember my sisters, they loved a movie called 'The Naked Island.' And the flute was actually playing the main theme. A Japanese movie. A beautiful movie from 1961. I remember hearing this music with a flute many, many times a day at home.

As a Western, 'The Magnificent Seven' was a pretty good film. I don't think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as 'Seven Samurai.'

One of the amazing things about 'Seven Samurai' is that there are a lot of characters. And considering you have so many, and they all have shaved heads, and you've got good guys and bad guys and peasants, you get to understand a lot of them without too much being said.

Really interesting genre films, especially monster movies, evoke the fears of the times intentionally. Our starting point was 'Godzilla' - the original movie was released less than 10 years after Hiroshima, and it's a classic in Japan.

I don't choose to make low-budget films. But that is the reality of surviving in the Japanese film industry. However, the trade off is, since we're working on small budgets, we have freedom. You can't buy this freedom with money. With this freedom, I think there are an infinite number of possibilities.

When you're talking about who is doing the most exciting and interesting horror films of the last 20 years, it's Japan. I mean, they are making amazing films.

When I was a little girl, I used to watch a lot of monster movies, like 'Godzilla.' All those monster movies.

If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.

'Ikiru' is existential but with a lot of tenderness.

The first movie that I saw was Godzilla and I loved it.

One Missed Call' was one of many J-horror films at that time.

Everybody already knows what Godzilla is.

Kurosawa is the sensei, the Shakespeare, of filmmaking.

I admire Akira Kurosawa. I have a deep admiration for him and I would love to make films like that.

'Your Name' is a film created with the innate imaginations of a Japanese team and put together in a domestic medium. When such a work is imbued with Hollywood filmmaking, we may see new possibilities that we had been completely unaware of - I am looking forward to the live-action film with excited anticipation.

For many years, my favorite director has been the Japanese giant Akira Kurosawa.

Being a wannabe auteur and my favorite filmmakers being part of the dead canon of European, Japanese art-house masters, I want to say that I don't want to care about genre and how it's limiting and all of that stuff.

Even if I were to try to imitate Kurosawa I know that it's absolutely impossible. That era of film was just something else, including the actors. Everything about that era was on a completely different level.

Maybe '13 Assassins' is the mortal agony and death rattle of a Japanese film industry that has abandoned its creative talent.

That is one reason so many of the Japanese pictures are not good, they cannot spare all the footage necessary for that bow, which is repeated over and over again.

I always loved Japanese movies. And they had an enormous impact in France - the Nouvelle Vague took so much from them. It taught us how the camera was placed in the centre of the action.

Japanese women have always loved my films, even when no one else did. Ever since I made 'Maurice' in the 1980s, I've been getting hundreds of letter from Japanese girls. They definitely have a special place in my heart.

I don't know what it is about 'Godzilla,' but as far as I'm concerned, the more versions of it, the better.

I am loath to suggest 'Visitor Q' to anyone, because you've got to have a warped brain to even understand or appreciate it a little bit. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have been blessed with a warped brain, and I really dug it.