Realism in Film Quotes

Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.

Ever since ROME, OPEN CITY, I have maintained a conscious, determined endeavor to try to understand the world in which I live, in a spirit of humility and respect for the facts and for history. What as the meaning of ROME, OPEN CITY? We were emerging from the tragedy of the war. We had all taken part in it, for we were all its victims. I sought only to picture the essence of things. I had absolutely no interest in telling a romanticized tale along the usual lives of film drama. The actual facts were each more dramatic than any screen cliche.

I get really excited when I see filmmakers make something that is subtle and feels real. It is really tough to do right.

If you're tracking with a character that's running off a thing and diving off, I would leave the camera there and not follow them down, because cameras don't do that. The audience understands that. I'll definitely bring that understanding of keeping things a bit more grounded.

When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.

I'm married to a nurse, and she is really, really ardent that - in screenplays or movies that I've worked on, that all the medical aspects be properly presented. I think that filmmakers ought to be respectful of all fields and not just be lazy and put nonsense in movies because most people won't know the difference.

You can't give someone five hundred punches in a film anymore. You beat on them, and they continue to stand there staring at you. That doesn't work. People just don't buy that anymore.

The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist

Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite.

The truth of the matter is movies are a reflection of life and violence is a real part of life. I don't think you could make movies exclusively where there was no violence.

When I stopped making films, they were getting on to the more realistic films and the explicit films and all. They were depicting life as it is, and some of it was unpleasant. I gradually moved away from that.

Maybe directors who are more interested in realism and naturalism come from cities, where they see things on their doorstep every day. But growing up as a kid in a very pretty but ever-so-slightly boring town, where not a great deal happened, encouraged me to be more escapist, more imaginative, and more of a daydreamer.

I love to get thrown around, and the reality about it. I hate watching a movie, knowing the actors are faking it.

I really want to do something that is very, very deep within realism, like a 'Winter's Bone,' or a 'Blue Valentine.'

I hate it when you are watching a movie where the characters are on the news, and for some reason they shoot it with a 35mm camera or a 4K camera, and they just put it on the TV as if that's the way it would look - it always takes me out of it by putting a filter on certain things. If it's too high quality, you're never gonna buy it.

Street-casting - people like Katie Jarvis in 'Fish Tank,' spotted having a row with her boyfriend on a railway platform - has helped make actors raise their game. They have to.

I was a big fan of John Cassavetes, his wife, Gena Rowlands, and that era of filmmaking which was about realism and which represented the antithesis of the dreamy escapism you found in musicals.

I hate it when you see in films people with their anoraks flapping open in a blizzard. They'd be dead in a couple of minutes. It's got to be real. It's got to work.

I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation. There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage. But in a movie, it has to be real, and the characters have to look entirely real because it's being done as a faux documentary, so there are even fewer actors that can do that on film.

The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

Nicholas Hytner, who directed Center Stage, is a huge ballet fan. He was completely open, as was Bruce Beresford, to get our perspective. "No, we wouldn't do this. Yes, we would do that. That's not realistic." So, I feel like Center Stage did well in that respect.

People think that the Italians invented neorealism, but actually, Humphrey Jennings did. He was revolutionary in using non-professional actors in his films, and he got extraordinary performances out of them.

The demarcation between an art house film and an entertainer has blurred, only because a larger section of the audience has accepted such realistic films.