Movie Preservation Quotes

When a movie opened - if you lived in New York, you would see it at Radio City Music Hall where it would play a couple of weeks, and then you moved on to the next movie. Now you can see it the rest of your life - it's going to be on Netflix and DVD.

I like movies where you can come back and re-watch them and admire the cinematography 25 years later.

When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go; they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.

I believe that DVD is that which gives some hope to retaining some content in movies that will appeal to an older audience or the more sophisticated audience or the audience that doesn't need or desire to see a movie on a Friday night.

I've been campaigning like anything for restoring these changes. For 27 years. I wrote a book about it, well, a portion of the book was devoted to these scenes and why they should have been in the movie.

Film is forever.

What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I don't know how long that's going to last.

The reason I put so much energy into it at the beginning was that while there were plenty of people looking after the talkies, almost nobody was doing the same for the silents. Now there are plenty of very good historians and restorers.

When I finish a film, I put it away and I never look at it again.

In the past, once a movie musical was made, it was believed that you were left with that version, good or bad, for posterity.

'Shotgun Stories' and 'Take Shelter'... I was willing to make those with no money and no time. With 'Mud,' I just wanted to protect it until I could have the resources. It's a real tricky movie.

I hope films will be somehow preserved and seen by as many people as possible in the future. There are endless treasures for audiences to discover, if only we can keep them from disappearing.