Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.
We go to the cinema we see images projected on the screen - but they're not real, they're only images.
The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.
There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
There are some films that arrive here from the international festival circuit almost incandescent with self-importance. They hover into the cinema in a kind of floating trance at how challenging and moving they are. They are films with a profound reluctance to get over themselves. They look up at the sceptical observer with the saucer-eyed saintliness of a baby seal in culling season, or a charity mugger smilingly wishing a nice day on the retreating back of a passer-by. One such is Babel.
Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone.
Watching a movie should be like hunting. Out of context, every image of the cinema is yours for a split second. Take them before they bury it.
You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.
The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature.
We don't experience things collectively or cathartically anymore. Viewing has become an intensely private, fetishistic, compulsive process that happens separately from others, and that reflects not only our relation to cinema as a space of possibility, belief, and imagination. But more generally, of what could be, of readiness, which is what the movies have historically been about - the ability to act on things and change.
I can't go to the cinema. I go to the bathroom in a petrol station and people come in there for autographs. It's tough but I knew that was going to be the case.
I have always hated the cinema.