I first came to cinema as a passionate filmgoer, when I was a child. Then, when I was a very young man, I became a film critic precisely because of my knowledge of cinema. I did better than others because of this. Then I moved on to screenwriting. I wrote a film with Sergio Leone, 'Once Upon a Time in the West. ' And then I moved to directing.
I'm under the impression that this notion of decency is disappearing from our society where conflicts are made worse on cinema and on television, where people are nasty and cruel on the Internet and where, in general, everybody seems to be very angry.
My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby - but just me. Nobody else.
Cinema is gambling. It is better to gamble on a unique film even if it seems like suicide.
you have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.
There is no border in my films. You can see yourself in these stories. This is the greatest thing about the power of cinema. It's very present. It's all there. You can't escape it.
You don't have to be musician to listen to music, and you don't have to be a filmmaker to go to the cinema, but somehow when we think of science, we think of it only as an academic discipline.
It's difficult to find new solicitations, new expressions. But this is talking about filmmaking. Cinema.
I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.
Cinema to me is like a religion. If I was going to have a religion it would be cinema.
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 cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.
I never studied film formally at school, but as a kid, I spent most of my time in cinemas.
Cinema has reached a dead end.
At times doc filmmaking feels more rewarding creatively. Because you are creating something out of pure cinema - instead of narrative cinema, where you've got a script and a cast and you build from your foundation, whereas in documentary, you're building out of chaos.
A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.
I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.
I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.
I don't believe that one has to tear down the cinema screen in order to renew cinema. But new input and new energy are lacking. They are flowing above all into the television technologies. We must, therefore, concentrate on the CD-ROM.
My absolute favorite song I've ever written is "This Is Where We Came In. " It's a nudge at younger listeners, cause at one time you could go into a cinema halfway through a film and then stay through and pick up where you left off.