Say what? Great quotes from great filmmakers

Filmmakers are such awesome people in general, pretty much anything they have to say is extremely interesting and offers some unique insight. Except for Australian director Ana Kokkinos, I got to sit in on an interview with her last month and boy can that bitch talk; mainly about herself and what a successful, brilliant, visionary filmmaker she is (snort). Anyway, I’ve put together a collection of my favourite quotes from filmmakers, some legendary and others, not so much. There’s many, many, many great quotes from filmmakers out there, but these are the ones that have really inspired me in some way, or made me laugh.

I hope you find them as intriguing as I did.

"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world." - John Houston

"Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure." - Federico Fellini (below)

"The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed." - Stanley Kubrick.

"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." - Alfred Hitchcock

“I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not." - Errol Morris

"Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul." - Ingmar Bergman

“Thank God I’m an atheist” - Luis Bunuel

"The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't." – Jean-Luc Godard (below)

“A fish may love a bird, but where would they live?” – Drew Barrymore

"I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead." – David Lynch

“Every day I’m intrigued and sometimes outraged by things that no one talks about. Current is a chance to be heard, and send think-bombs out into the world.” – Catherine Hardwicke

Basically I marvel at anything Woody Allen has ever said (besides “Mia, I’m leaving you for Soon-Yi”) as the man has such an interesting perspective on, well, everything. I may be a little biased with the following quotes as I got to hear them straight from the man’s mouth during a phone interview, but they really have stuck with me.

“In life, as long as you don’t hurt anybody – life is such a painful experience for most people – whatever works, whatever gives you that little bit of happiness. It doesn’t have to obey conventional rules or please people. It doesn’t have to be what you planned your whole life.”

“I have never tried to pay homage to anybody. I rip off when I want to rip off, but I never pay homage. My feeling is if you’re going to steals, steal from the best.”

“I’m really interested in my appraisal of them (my films) and not the public appraisal, because they don’t know. The public, in general, will say what they’re told to say by people they consider their betters.”

“I’ve never had a muse in my life, there’s never been anybody that has inspired me in any way to make a film. It’s always hard, grinding work; I go in to a room, I sit, I think. No muse ever shows up with any good news for me.”

“Usually if I’m making a film, I have a good idea and I screw it up.”