movies Quotes

“His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.”

“I believe in happy endings,” I tell him, “And it feels like this movie has gone on for the right amount of time.”

“Was what he had heard about rich white people really true? Was he going to work for people like you saw in the movies . . . ? He looked at Trader Horn unfold and saw pictures of naked black men and women whirling in wild dances . . . .”

″... Now sit back, open your eyes, and be prepared to dream.”

“It can tell you the incredible story of Georges Méliès, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician.”

“Having an eye patch actually makes it easier to look through a camera - I don’t have to close one eye like everyone else.”

“Hugo’s father had stepped into a dark room, and on a white screen he had seen a rocket fly right into the eye of the man in the moon. Father said he had never experienced anything like it. It had been like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.”

“There are a lot of things you can do with film, but you don’t have unlimited access to your audience. In other words, keep it simple. You tell the story; you don’t look for the camera technician to tell the story for you. When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy, you can bet he’s worried either about his story or about his ability to tell it.”

“People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them having them! Yes, until there’s a war. That’s when adventure becomes available to the masses!”

“When you convert a good book to a film, stupid things happen.”

“I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in.”

“As sleep crept up on me I turned my mind to my evening ritual […] a movie that I ran in my head every night. In the movie I watched my parents going about their normal lives. […] I didn’t know if I was making myself feel bad by trying to make myself feel good, thinking about my parents, but it was my way of keeping them alive and in my thoughts.”

“It was moving and touching and William was moved and touched.”