British Film Quotes

Film-makers should remain true to their principles and never compromise, there is a real revival in the British film industry but there is a danger that we will become colonial servants of Hollywood. We need to maintain our own integrity.

There just seems to be more acceptance now of other kinds of British films, than the picture-postcard ones.

I don't care to analyze acting. On the other hand there is a fascination because distributors are putting out British films. You get films here with great performances you'll never see again. Why compare. We should go after the businessmen.

I'm not at all fed up with British films, but I am fed up with playing upper-class people.

Id love to work in the States; Id love to work anywhere where you get a good script and a good part to play. But I do love British film as well.

I can't always be making "British films". Why should we be making films about corsets and horses and girls learning to drive when Americans send over an event movie and make five or 10 million?

I'm somebody who is very, very proud to have been a part of the British film industry all my life and to have kind of been involved with a very important piece of British film history.

It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.

I think the British industry is set up to support British film, if we make films that enable them to support it. If you don't make a commercial film, distributors can't get behind it. If they don't get behind it, the film doesn't do well.

I think it's important that we have a new batch of British film-makers that aren't doing the same old stuff. And that includes me.

I mean Filth is the best British film since Trainspotting. It might even be better. I keep watching it back to back with Trainspotting to try and work out which is the best. I can't split them.

The problem with the British film industry is the nervousness and insecurity about - and genuflection toward - Los Angeles.

A lot of the reasons that I'm resistant to making films in the U.S. have nothing to do with not doing a film in Hollywood, but rather to do with what I'm committed to working on in the U.K. I feel very committed to the British film industry and infrastructure.

British films are all "room with a view and a staircase and a pond."

When I became the chair of the British Film Institute, I didn't understand how much of my time would be taken up with trying to make a case for the British Film Institute: what it's for, why it exists, why it needs its money.

People say, "How do you get into the British film industry?" There is no British film industry, there are just people making films and finding their own way. It's not like in the States where there are studios and there's an actual infrastructure to it; there's just nothing here. You make it from scratch a lot of the time.

It's weathered many a storm, but the British film industry is, thankfully, still afloat.

London exists normally in a state of bleach bypass. There's the artistic context of "Blow Up" and "Performance" and all the Sixties and Seventies British films that I grew up on, because I did very much grow up on British films.

The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business. It just doesn't work and you're going to hit a brick wall at some point.

I'd rather do theater and British films than move to L.A. in hopes of getting small roles in American films.

Youre only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!

As a black actress, all I was offered in British film was the best friend role, whereas in television, I was offered a whole spectrum of parts.

I built up a knowledge of 1960s and '70s British films because my dad used to work nights, and I'd sit up with my mum and watch films - 'How I Won the War' and the films of Richard Lester, Karel Reisz and John Schlesinger.