I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.
I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.
The BFI exists to celebrate all poets of world cinema, of the past and present.
If you lived in a provincial town like Torre Annunziata, where there was nothing to do in the evening but go to the movies with your friends, the cinema was a world of fantasy. I had always been in love with it.
Cinema is changing every week, and multiplex audiences are demanding every week.
Writers would hate me saying this, and I love words, but I have to say that cinema exists, on one level, for the power of the big image and what that image does.
Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
One of the things I love about cinema is the range.
It's part of developing the whole state of how cinema is; everyone is looking out and engaged rather than it being just a financial thing or sitting back, waiting for scripts to turn up.
War is cinema, and cinema is war
That sort of detailed filmmaking is one, hard to do and not have it be pretentious, and two, have it tell the story, which is what you're taught, that cinema is the language of images and you really should be able to make a film with no dialogue and tell a story.
Just look at the history of cinema. The most reproduced male character is probably the hero and the most reproduced female character is probably the sex object. I think those stereotypes have been reproduced over and over again. It also changes our expectations when it comes to a situation like this in real life.
Cinema, for me, has always been something like music composed with photographic images.
A movie is something you see, cinema is something that’s made.
Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.
For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.
There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.
Why would anything change that has not been changed since the existence of cinema? [James] Baldwin somehow wakes you up to reality. It takes you out of the dream - or out of the nightmare.
I lived right on the borderline of a black neighborhood. So I could go into the black area and then there'd be these ghetto theaters that you could actually see the new kung fu movie or the new blaxploitation movie or the new horror film or whatever. And then there was also, if you went just a little further away, there was actually a little art house cinema. So I could actually see, you know, French movies or Italian movies, when they came out.