Quentin Tarantino - Mary Pickford - Martin Amis - Jean Cocteau - Martin Scorsese - Jean-Luc Godard - Francis Ford Coppola - Mel Brooks - Orson Welles - Eric Cantona - Jacques Audiard - Michael Moore - Roman Polanski - The Genius of Invention TV - Arena: All the World’s a Screen TV - Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV - What is Cinema? 2013 - What We Do in the Shadows TV - Alexei Sayle TV - Big Train TV -
My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I’ll be manager. I’ll be the crazy old movie guy. Quentin Tarantino
Make them laugh, make them cry, and hack to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that. Mary Pickford
I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.) Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir
The cinema, that Temple of Sex, with its Goddesses, its Guardians and its Victims. Jean Cocteau
The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings. Martin Scorsese
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. Jean-Luc Godard
Anyone who’s made film and knows about the cinema has a lifelong love affair with the experience. You never stop learning about film. Francis Ford Coppola
A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan. Mel Brooks
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics – the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room. Orson Welles
I like to stay at home and make cinema in my head. Eric Cantona
Used properly, cinema is the coolest thing in the world. Jacques Audiard
The idea that cinema can be dangerous is a great idea. Michael Moore
Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theatre. Roman Polanski
Cinema came with its own army of naysayers and doom-mongers. The Genius of Invention IV: Visual Image, BBC 2013
Since the invention of cinema over a century ago, Shakespeare’s plays have often been adapted for the big screen. But it took fifty years for his work to turn into a truly cinematic experience. Arena: All the World’s a Screen, BBC 2016
Olivier 1948 Hamlet: the first British production to win the Oscar for Best Picture. In the same year across the Atlantic the precocious actor and director Orson Welles made a dark savage version of Macbeth: ‘a big critical failure.’ ibid. Welles
More than 400 silent films were adapted from Shakespeare. ibid.
Albatross! Albatross! Albatross? I haven’t got choc-ices. I’ve only got the albatross. Monty Python’s Flying Circus s1e13: Intermission, BBC 1970
Sometimes you find that a film is looked at solely for its content without any regard to the style or manner in which the story is told. What is Cinema? Hitchcock, 2013
When we experience a film, we prime ourselves for illusion. We make way for it in our imagination. ibid. Ingmar Bergman
The screen must speak its own language, freshly coined. ibid. Hitchcock
Great films tell a story, a surface story, but the great cinema goes deep into the psyche and these undercurrents are caught on deeper levels. ibid. David Lynch
Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen. ibid. Robert Bresson
I didn’t go to film school. I went to films. I steal from every movie ever made. ibid. Quentin Tarantino
Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. ibid. Frederico Fellini
Melodrama does to cinema what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it’s all downhill. ibid. Lillian Hellman
All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. ibid. Jean-Luc Godard
Cinema makes us aware of what it is to be a human being. Take a close look at the world. It will lay bare for you all its reality. ibid. Andre Bazin
A film is not ready-made. It makes itself as it goes along. ibid. Robert Breson
There are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything. ibid. Abbas Kiarostami
Movies are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen without hearing. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. ibid. Stanley Kubrick
Real cinema sings the truth of our lives today. And with every image, every sound of true cinema, the old is shaken. ibid. Jonas Mekas
So where’s the Cannes Film Festival being held this year? ibid. Christine Aguilera
If anyone tells you there is only one way to make cinema, their way, get away from those fuckers as soon as possible. ibid. Jim Jarmusch
Nadja: We have just returned from the Talkies.
Laszlo: They should never have added sound. There’s pop music and people talking all the way through it. What We Do in the Shadows s2e7: The Run, BBC 2020
Ladies and Gentlemen, there’s still plenty of time before tonight’s main feature to visit our refreshments kiosk in the foyer and sample our delicious selection of Butterkist, Kiora, King Cones and Toffee Poppets, peanuts, popcorn, pisscorn, niblets, giblets, nutty snacks … Alexei Sayle’s Stuff s1e5, BBC 1988
Morphine: Available from Pharmacists Throughout Great Britain and the Empire. Big Train s2 episode, silent-film cinema advertisement, BBC 2002