- Edward Neumeier - Interviewee: Science fiction particularly allows you to do things politically that you wouldn't do - that might not be accepted as easily if you did them straight, because it's not here, it's slightly over here. It's a little bit skewed. And I think humor does the same thing. And if you add them together in the right way, then you can - you can probably get away with murder if you want.
- [last lines]
- Baz Luhrmann - Interviewee: That's where the romanticism comes in, is that we're making something that happens in life *better* than it is in life. Bigger than it is in life.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: Better and bigger than life. Exactly what many movies makers aimed for in the last days of digital, at the end of the old millennium. The story of film was full of the fizz and feedback of those days. And the rapture of self-loss. But then came the 21st century.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: The emphasis on the surrealism of everyday talk became know as Tarantino-esque, after the film's write-director, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino-esque somehow meant both more real, and less real than life, at the same time. And Tarantino wasn't only significant for his dialog. Like Scorsese, he was a "hyperlink" to film history.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: 70s cinema had been about what we *wanted* to see. Jaws, The Exorcist, Star Wars. 90s cinema had become *can* see.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: [blurry 1900s footage] Real human courage and imagination goes into a shot like this. The camera and the guy are really strapped to the plane as it does a scary loop-T-loop.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: [crisp CGI aerial approach from Gladiator, 2000] Hard work and long hours spent in relative comfort, eating pizza, got a shot like this.
- Baz Luhrmann - Interviewee: Shakespeare and Bollywood cinema had something in common. And what they had in common was the blindness to taste or style or any of those imposed ideals about art. What they were singularly focused on was the engagement of as many human beings as possible, from as many types of humanity, to be moved and touched by story, to deliver a big idea. A big idea through an emotional experience.
- Baz Luhrmann - Interviewee: [walking through the thought process of making Romeo + Juliet, 1996] The audience know this is going to happen. How can it happen in a way in which their delicious expectation and enjoyment of it's-going-to-happen, be suspended so that then it happens, it's a surprise they knew was going to happen? It was perplexing.
- Mark Cousins - Presenter: [about Moulin Rouge!, 2001] Visually this is pure romantic cinema. Moon light, a roof-top tryst, reverse angle editing, two-shots. But the music is a wild 90s mash-up of pop songs used almost like dialog, as if reality had been remixed by a DJ.
- Baz Luhrmann - Interviewee: [walking through the thought process of making Romeo + Juliet, 1996] The audience knows this is going to happen. How can it happen in a way in which their delicious expectation and enjoyment of it's-going-to-happen, be suspended so that then it happens, it's a surprise they knew was going to happen? It was perplexing.