- Woo-Ping Yuen - Interviewee: [about making The Matrix] None of the actors knew Kung Fu, not even how to use their fists. I was very troubled by that. It took me four months to train them.
- Javed Akhtar - Interviewee: You must have seen children playing with a string and a pebble. They tie a string to a pebble and they start swinging it over their head. And slowly they keep letting the string, and it makes a bigger and bigger circle. Now, this pebble is the revolt from the tradition. It wants to move away. But the string is the tradition, the continuity, it is holding it. But if you break the string, the pebble will fall. If you remove the pebble, the string cannot go that far. This tension of tradition and revolt against the tradition are, in a way, contradictory. But as a matter of fact, it is a synthesis. You will always find the synthesis of tradition and revolt from the tradition, together in any good art.
- Amitabh Bachchan - Interviewee: [quoting his father] The most exciting thing about Indian cinema is that you get poetic justice in three hours. You don't get poetic justice in a lifetime, sometimes.
- Youssef Chahine - Interviewee: We've proven that we were civilized 7000 years ago. Are we so underdeveloped? That's not civilization. Civilization is how you contact the other people. Do you know how to love? Do you know how to care? This is civilization. If you go to a very poor man here, and he has nothing to give you, he'd go and borrow from his neighbors a loaf of bread, and he'd offer it to you. In Europe you may faint and drop dead in the street, and people will just walk away from you.
- [first lines]
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: Movie fans around the world, most of them will have heard of the box office smash hits of the 70s: Jaws, Star Wars, The Exorcist, the Bruce Lee movies from Hong Kong, and the Indian epic, Sholay.
- Stanley Kwan - Interviewee: The Shaw Brothers, such a big studio, made films of many types. And eventually more muscular films about male bonding, in the style of Chan Cheh stood out. This new trend was related to the decrease in age of the audience.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: But for all the dynamism of Bruce Lee films, if we look again at them, we see that though *he* was fast and furious, the camera work was anything but. It patiently recorded the action. It stayed out of the fight.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: By the 70s, the Bollywood bauble got bigger and shinier. In 1971 alone, India made 433 films. At least as many as were made in America in the same year.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: Something happened in American cinema that changed everything. A movie about a shark took 260 million dollars at the U.S. Box office. A scary film about a girl possessed by the devil took 200 million at the box office. A Sci-Fi movie about the Force and the evil Darth Vader demolished all records, taking nearly 500 million. Cinema was on a roller coaster. There'd never been figures like this before. The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars changed American, and then world cinema. Producers started making movies about things people fantasize about seeing.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: [about Star Wars] This is the most absurd plot we've yet heard in this story of film, and yet the movie charms. In part because it draws richly from film history.