Film Quotes

Film has to describe and show.

For film and television, it's interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It's not just about being a fan, it's about how you perform your fandom. That's always been interesting to me.

When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you're required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems.

You have to find it in the moment, and that's one of the challenges of being an actor - especially a film actor - is that you have to maintain these heightened emotions for long periods of time. There's no trick to it. You just have to do.

George Lucas was casting about and had heard favourable things about my work in Clockwork Orange and asked me to come in, which of course I did even though no one knew what the film was about!

Working on movies made me realize how fluid the medium of film was.

I am never driven. Every film I've made has been an assignment.

Editing is a natural extension of the collage making. It's actually one of the few areas that women were able to excel in in the film industry from the beginning.

I love the film route and I'm gong to try my hardest to stay on it.

The '80s were a time of technical wonder in filmmaking; unfortunately, some colleges didn't integrate their film and theater departments - so you had actors who were afraid of the camera, and directors who couldn't talk to the actors.

As an actor, you have many tools - your body, your voice, your emotions, mentally. In film, you have your eyes because they communicate your thought process. In fact, generally in film, what you don't say is more important than what you say. That's not so much the case for stage.

Only after awhile. After it came out and people began to engage in discussions about the social reflections of the film that I realized it had an importance I hadn't thought of.

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'

When I see a film I've finished, it's like another person made it. Like another mind.

There were no previews; we made the film we wanted to make.

So as I was growing up, my father was always in the middle of making a film or preparing a film. It was a full-time, all-consuming type of operation.

To act with a tennis ball and imagine it's a tentacle, or if you're in some kind of wilderness film and you go, 'Okay, we can't have a grizzly bear here, but imagine when you step over the rock there there's a grizzly bear.' I don't know. They're tough moments.

I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul.

I met Milos in 1967. I was working on a student film. And there is Milos Forman. So that's how I met Milos.

There are only 24 hours in a day, and my top priority is working on my films, but I love short film experiments.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

When I think about actors I know, I'd much rather hear about who they're shagging than what film they're doing next.

I was totally unknown in the television and film industry in Canada.

If you look round Hollywood there's no end of white smiles and six packs. Long lines of beautiful people lining up to be incredible on film.

The lifeblood of my career has been independent film.

In independent film you tend to have stories that involve more of a community, and the smaller characters are important to the story.

I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there's just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.

When I make a film I'm away from home for two to three months. So I want my kids to look at my films one day and say, I love his movies, I love his choices-because he loved them.

The thing that separates a so-so director and a great director is a love and caring for film.

I never thought of becoming a director. When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me - I still watch silent films.