I still don't look at movies twice. It's funny, I just feel I got it the first time. With music it's different. People respond so differently to the whole issue of seeing a movie many times. I'm astonished when I talk to really good critics, who know their stuff and will see a film eight or ten or twelve times. I don't see how they can do it without hating the movie. I would.

It’s funny, it’s amazing how many people go see a movie and have not seen anything about it. People like you and I go to the movies and we’re worried that we’ve seen every scene through all the commercials, and yet half the audience, a lot of people make their decision what movie to see while they’re standing in line. So, I really don’t know. Audiences are getting very specific and segmented, but to me, the dream is still the movie that’s for everyone and it’s harder to reach everyone nowadays.

I like the saying "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same — the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds — every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with. So you don’t know how it's going to hit people. But if you thought about how it's going to hit people, or if it's going to hurt someone, or if it's going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films. You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what's going to happen.

Sundance is weird. The movies are weird—you actually have to think about them when you watch them.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.

Two people rarely see the same thing.

Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us.

From every film you learn something new, but from my experience you never know what film is going to open what doors, and it always happens when you least expect it.

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

Two normal observers viewing the same object from the same place under the same physical circumstances do not necessarily have identical visual experiences, even though the images on their respective retinas may be virtually identical.

A movie should present its characters with a problem and then watch them solve it, not without difficulty. So says an old and reliable screenplay formula. Countless movies have been made about a boy and a girl who have a problem (they haven't slept with each other) and after difficulties (family, war, economic, health, rival lover, stupid misunderstanding) they solve it by sleeping with each other. Now we have a movie about two homosexuals that follows the same reliable convention.

When a man is not concerned with "seeing," things look very much the same to him every time he looks at the world. When he learns to "see," on the other hand, nothing is ever the same every time he "sees" it, and yet it is the same. To the eye of a seer, a man is like an egg. Every time he "sees" the same man he "sees" a luminous egg, yet it is not the same luminous egg.

It's not an old movie if you haven't seen it.

Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing [actions shows on TV], as long as the details are different. But I'm just the opposite: if I'm going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don't want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel. (1960's)