There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.
Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.
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.
Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don't manage that - but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.
The blue collar milieu was something that I really understood and resonated with me and I thought was underrepresented in American cinema.
I am really not interested in the cinema. I loathed it when I started six years ago, and I don't enjoy it even now.
When you're on TV, you come into people's homes. In theater and film, they go to you - to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it's very different.
Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.
What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.
I know my comfort zone and I know what my strong points are and my first love was always music. I'm a huge cinema fan. I was taking my time; I got offered a lot of scripts and things along the way but until Burlesque showed up at my doorstep, it really spoke to me. I have a collection of burlesque books at home that I've had for years. I've always been intrigued and fascinated with the topic, the beauty and the art of it and the comedic value of it. I think it's just a beautiful, empowering thing for women.
My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.
Cinema is entertainment, and people go to the movies because they want to feel good and forget about everything.
Every time I go past a cinema and see a queue out the door, I think, look at those fools, every penny they spend is turned into profits that are used to pass laws imprisoning their own children. Can't they see?
I don't go to the cinema much.
I think that it's not a bad thing to not be too versed in the vocabulary of cinema, because you start to think that certain things are allowed and not allowed.
The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.
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.
I'm an idol of cinema? Oh, wow.
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.
Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.