Film History Quotes

The tragedy of film history is that it is fabricated, falsified, by the very people who make film history.

I was born in Rome on March 11, 1923. Because of my age, I've become a piece of this country's history, but it's also true that a certain strand of Italy's film history has passed though me.

It also happens that I don't actually teach about the stuff I make things about. I'm not a film history teacher. In that way, it's also a release. But the ideas that I talk about in the movie are the same I talk about in school.

I write and film history; I don't make it.

I read a lot of plays as a kid, but I didn't see that many plays, so I feel better-versed in film history and film structure. I just think it's easier to think in pictures.

Then I realized my early work did have something special that audiences adored apart from what I humbly thought about them. They occupy a distinguished niche in Italian film history and probably always will.

When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.

There are [in Hollywood] some endemic problems and some things that happen over and over again. There's the problem of representation of basically anybody but white men. These are things that we talk about a lot in contemporary culture, and it's interesting to me to go look at film history from the perspective of today.

I don't really deal with the attention I receive to be honest. I build up a fantasy world around me that I inhabit. I cherry pick elements of literature, music, film, history and art, then weave them together to construct a fantasy reality to live in. It doesn't always work out though, I got evicted from my own fantasy once, which was quite embarrassing.

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's a required part of your film history to know who Woody is. His movies are so wonderful, and not just funny but so insightful about human behavior.

I am a Scorpio, and playing the seductress appeals to me. There are a lot of women throughout film history, like Marlene Dietrich or Mae West - those are the women I was always attracted to. The bad girls.

Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!

A boy's best friend is his mother.

Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon.

To me film school was film history because there weren't a lot of books out there that I had access to.

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

You're gonna need a bigger boat.

May the Force be with you.

I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.

I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.

My momma always said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."