A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.

Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.

If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn't go see it.

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.

I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.

Filmmaking can be a fine art.

Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.

I just like movies that somehow expose the world in a way that's different than you imagine it.

It's the story that counts.

A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

You know what your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies - all of life's riddles are answered in the movies.

I'm married to the theater but my mistress is the films.

In the next couple of years, part of every film's process is going to be to adjust the images. And it'll be to change the color of an actor's tie or change the little smirky thing he's doing with his mouth. Or you can put in more clouds or move the tree a little bit.

If my films don't show a profit, I know I'm doing something right.

There's only one thing that can kill the movies, and that's education.

Make them laugh, make them cry, and hack to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that.

Hitchcock had a charm about him. He was very funny at times. He was incredibly brilliant in his field of suspense.

When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.

Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

I've made 122 movies, and I daresay there's a picture of mine showing somewhere in the world every day.

And I always had this idea for making a movie about a femme fatale, because I like these characters. They're a lot of fun, they're sexy, they're manipulative, they're dangerous.

I wanted to escape Small Town U.S.A. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities.

The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point.

I like the idea of movies having a magic element. How many times have you seen an actor in a movie who you know only as the character? It's wonderful, isn't it?

'Home Alone' was a movie, not an alibi.

I don't storyboard. I guess it dates back to my days in live television, where there was no possibility of storyboarding and everything was shot right on the spot - on the air, as we say - at the moment we were transmitting. I prefer to be open to what the actors do, how they interact to the given situation.

I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.

I make movies I want to see.

An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Horror movies are the best date movies. There's no wondering, 'When do I put my arm around her?'

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.

Film spectators are quiet vampires.

I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public.

Everyone told me to pass on 'Speed' because it was a 'bus movie.'

Movies are something people see all over the world because there is a certain need for it.

I think you kind of hope for people to gush over movies, but I think the opposite way is great sometimes, too. I'd rather have a movie that you're angry about and that you're talking about the next day, than something you forget about when the popcorn goes into the trash.

You can map your life through your favorite movies, and no two people's maps will be the same.

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

Nobody makes movies bad on purpose.

Every time I make a picture the critics' estimate of American public taste goes down ten percent.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

The end of a picture is always an end of a life.

Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre.

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty; to interpret it his problem; and to express it his dedication.

Give me a couple of years, and I'll make that actress an overnight success.

Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I'd ever have any interest in filmmaking.

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'

A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake.

I never enjoyed working in a film.

I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.

I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.

We are the movies and the movies are us.

Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.

The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of my movies, brings a whole set of unique experiences. Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

I made over forty Westerns. I used to lie awake nights trying to think up new ways of getting on and off a horse.

I have a love interest in every one of my films: a gun.

Film lovers are sick people.

Movies are like magic tricks.

The secret to film is that it's an illusion.

I feel like a lot of the female relationships I see on TV or in movies are in some way free of the kind of jealousy and anxiety and posturing that has been such a huge part of my female friendships, which I hope lessens a little bit with age.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

Acting is not about being famous, it's about exploring the human soul.

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

I never thought I'd land in pictures with a face like mine.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.

Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?

Everything makes me nervous - except making films.

There's an electrical thing about movies.

Movies are an art form that is very available to the masses.

The movies we love and admire are to some extent a function of who we are when we see them.

I was obsessed with romance. When I was in high school, I saw 'Doctor Zhivago' every day from the day it opened until the day it left the theater.

Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.

I do believe that movies are subject to a million interpretations.

The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.

When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.

I am a cynical optimist. Big opening weekends are like cotton candy. The films you will remember over time are the films that stick in the consciousness of the audience in a good way.

I don't take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache.