Film Quotes. I absolutely love filmmaking quotes, and they often inspire me to watch a new film or create something original. However, sometimes all I do is eat, breathe, and sleep film. Particularly during awards season, when I am busy working on a movie or television show, I spend all my free time trying to consume all the films in contention. Additionally, researching and writing about film and production design for Art Departmental, I feel all filmed out sometimes.
Yesterday, I asked myself, during a moment of exasperation, “How did this happen? How did this artistic medium swallow me whole?” There are many answers to those questions, which I won’t go into here, but when I think about it, I don’t regret it. I’d be aloof without my life in film.
The thing about cinema is that it is the one form of expression that encompasses all other art forms. How could we not fall madly in love with it? So today, I am celebrating my passion for film and embracing its hold over me by sharing my six favourite filmmaking quotes with you.
Below are the film quotes I found best describe the power of cinema. Hopefully, these quotes about film resonate and inspire you, too.
Film Quotes: 6 Quotes About Filmmaking That Will Inspire You Share on X6 Film Quotes That Inspire
Casablanca (1942)
“What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all individuals. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema, people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.” –John Berger
“Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness.” –Ingmar Bergman
“Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from the inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.” –Don Delillo
“A film is — or should be — more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings.” –Stanley Kubrick
“If I’d have gone to art school or stayed in anthropology, I probably would have ended up back in film … Mostly, I just followed my inner feelings and passions … and kept going to where it got warmer and warmer until it finally got hot … Everybody has talent. It’s just a matter of moving around until you’ve discovered what it is.” –George Lucas
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.” –Jean-Luc Godard
Do you have any film quotes you absolutely love? Why do you love film? What makes a film great? I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments below.
Obsessed with filmmaking? Why not check out our Filmmaking Glossary of Terms.
