Cinema is an art form that is designed to go across borders. And as a filmmaker, the only way I can direct a movie is when I feel close to my culture.
I prefer watching people on a screen, and I've had the most pleasurable people-watching experiences at the Palace Cinema in Balwyn.
In some ways, I think 'Pulp Fiction' hurt cinema in a very, very minor, small way. It did a massive amount of good. But it also made it impossible to make a movie even remotely like it without someone comparing it to 'Pulp Fiction.'
Audiences change because life changes. Countries change geographically, climatically, socially and morally. Many things happen, and cinema, in a sense, reflects what's happening in the world.
Luckily, there is a wind of change happening in Hindi cinema. Good work is coming to people who are not conventionally good looking like Ranbir Kapoor or Akshay Kumar.
Magic in cinema is a bit like ventriloquism on the radio.
I prefer the Telugu film industry, as women are respected more than they are in the Tamil film industry. In Tamil cinema, they care only about their hero, who is God.
I was raised in a family where cinema was a way of life. It was not only about making films, it was relationship, passion, love, everything at the same time.
I love Bollywood films, but I have been trained in independent cinema.
Growing up in Hollywood, like I did, I have a passion and a love for the movies, so I go to the cinema all the time.
Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.
One of my uncles took me to my first movie in a cinema - 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.'
I'm not a Little Englander. Historically, British people have always been travellers. I look in the world as one place. You have to think in a global sense. Cinema is a global endeavour. My roots are in England but my endeavours are worldwide.
Cinema is my religion. It is a way to make people sensitive, through emotions. To make them feel, experience empathy. People are touched and act ethically when they are emotionally touched.
I think the first British actor who really worked well in cinema was Albert Finney. He was a back-street Marlon Brando. He brought a great wittiness and power to the screen. The best actor we've had.
I thought I was okay in my first film, and then I was really, really bad in some films. I really cringe when I see some of my scenes. There's a scene in one film where a dog is biting me; the expressions I have made should be qualified as the most over-acted scene in the history of the cinema. The dog's expressions were more real than mine.
'Khoobsurat' was an eye-opener in many ways. Cinema is a colossal money-churning business in India, and working in that environment offered me quite an incredible learning experience.
One of the reasons I do like 'Cult' is that it plays along the same vibe as the movie 'Seven,' which I absolutely love. There was a period of cinema in the mid-'90s that I was a huge fan of, with 'Heat' and 'Seven' and the Tarantino era. If I've ever been fanatical, it was about those films, back in the day.
During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema.
I bask in the affection I get on the streets. I recently went into the kitchen of a restaurant to meet the cooks. They were people I didn't know, but what a joy it was meet them! Such experiences wouldn't happen if I were doing only one kind of cinema.
I don't really know how my family and friends will react to seeing me on screen in a cinema. I'm sure it'll be an odd experience for them, just like I'm sure it will be for me.
I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.
Foreign audiences are used to seeing Mexico in other sorts of movies. 'Casi divas' is a step toward a more commercially successful cinema, without the violence, blood and exaggerations. The movie reflects a more human Mexico, while remaining a chick flick, although it is not a romantic comedy.
My grandmother would take me to the cinema quite a lot. She'd take me with her and sometimes she'd sneak my sister in, and then we'd sometimes just sit and watch the movie again.
Cinema is incredibly concise.
The corporation and the hedge funds have a hold on Hollywood, and they all want to make money on anything that signifies cinema.
When I was a child, the temptation to sin was always a romantic option. This romantic option led me to the cinema, a place where sin was welcome.
I love the idea of thinking of cinema as not that far from music. A lot of my favourite movie makers, the way they move their cameras or the way they cut just feel very musical - even if the movies have no music in them at all.
Chennai is the birthplace of a new language in cinema. The audiences here are the most evolved moviegoers to be found anywhere in India.
If you are not breaking rules and you are not taking risks, you are not going to end up with movies where there is discovery... and, to me, that is the magic of going into the cinema.
In terms of popular cinema, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is as near perfection as I can think of.
Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.
Maybe actors are more passionate about cinema than actresses. Many heroines today seem unable to look beyond glamour.
I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.
I love silent cinema but don't hold it sacred. Like any branch of film there are some very boring films alongside the masterpieces.
Agnes Varda changed my view of cinema; she directs from an artistic point of view, and a film is most of all the expression of an artistic director. I learnt to enter the world and the imagination of a director.
