Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Lynne Ramsay's 'Ratcatcher' blew me away when it came out. When I started making short films, I would watch that film over and over again, marvelling at how that story visually unfolded.
For me, all you want from your actor is for them to engage on a deeply emotional level with the material. If you feel like that happens, directing the actors is pretty much done at that point.
I don't want a performance to give me everything. You can look at Charlotte Rampling in '45 Years,' and you don't really know what she's thinking, but you know something interesting is happening.
Coming from a different perspective on a society is really interesting. I love the Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Phantom Thread,' and that's a version of Britishness and Englishness made by an American.
In stories, those are the moments that hit me the most: when people really don't expect it, don't have it much in their lives, and suddenly, an act of kindness. It's like, 'Oh, God! Heartbreaking!'
As a person, I am totally obsessed with the choices and decisions we make in our lives and how they dictate the course of our lives. Seemingly random choices that we make end up defining everything.
If I see someone break down in tears, I don't necessarily feel empathy for them in those moments unless it's really warranted. I feel like a tear needs to be warranted in a movie; it needs to be earned.
Class is really interesting to me, maybe because I'm from England where there is a pretty hideous, deep-rooted obsession with class. I don't like the obsession with class, but it certainly interests me.
I think it is a burden... that we constantly realise that there isn't that much rhyme or reason to why something happens. If we think about that too much, it can make all of our decisions very stressful.
We have a choice every day to do whatever we do, and that choice is quite scary because it could absolutely change everything about our lives. It's important to keep reminding myself that I have a choice.
The endings to me are the key moment in 'Weekend' and '45 Years.' I know how I want my gut to feel at the ending. Even if I can't articulate in words what that feeling is, I'm trying to find ways to get there.
My films are very everyday, and people don't always want to go to the cinema to see ordinary lives. They want to see something a bit more extraordinary. I get that desire, but it's not the kind of film I want to make.
People don't think the struggles gay people have are worth talking about because everyone's decided that we're all equals now. Those struggles are much more subtle now. But the weight of being different does carry on.
In the early stages of being out, you meet all these people from all kinds of backgrounds, and the one thing you have in common is you're all gay, but then you start to realise how different your experiences actually are.
Our lives are largely made up of a series of mundane moments, but those little moments are often the finesse that shapes our entire existence; it's not necessarily the big, dramatic events, although they do, too, of course.
The kinds of films I like are the ones that take their time. If you reach an emotional pinnacle too early on in a film, that's kind of it. I think, as in real life, when you're getting to know someone, it starts off slowly.
One of the reasons I wanted to make 'Lean on Pete' was that it wasn't about identity. For me, it's about something more essential underneath: the need to have somewhere to live, to be safe, and have someone to look after you.
That's the biggest thing I struggle with. We could never hope to represent every gay person in America. There will be people who will say, 'Well, my experience of being gay isn't like that,' to which I can only say, 'That's fine.'
I think people have this idea that I just lived in my place in England and never left. During 'Looking,' I was in America for four years. I've got a green card. I spend half my time there. It doesn't feel like an alien world at all.
For a long time, gay men fought to be seen as different, doing our own thing: This is our lives; this is what we do. Accept it. There's a conservatism that has come into the gay community: 'We're just like you, just like everyone else.'
It's very important that all the supporting characters feel like they've existed in the world, that they've had a history, and they'll go on to have a history within the scope of the story rather than just popping up and then disappearing.
We get older, and we get more wrinkles, but fundamentally, we stay the same... You have the same fears and doubts and concerns and dreams and passions and all those kinds of things, so I feel like you don't change as much as you think you do.
You can't expect to connect with everybody, and that's all right. The more I make films, I'm learning that you don't have to make films for everybody. A film can be made for a smaller group of people than that, and it still warrants an existence.
People have very difficult lives. We can judge them for making the wrong decisions, but if you look harder and understand that these lives can be difficult, hopefully you're at least a bit more sympathetic to the decisions these people have to make.
If I can do a scene in one shot, it's in one shot. Most of my shots are pretty long. I think with 'Looking,' what we have in the first minute is a whole episode of a traditional TV show. I like to let things breathe; I like to let things have a certain tone.
I think the films that work the best are the ones that seem to be about one thing but then, under the surface, bubbling away, are lots more important questions that you're not really aware of, and when you leave the cinema, your mind is ablaze with different thoughts!
I always think that there's a weight of prejudice from the past that gay people perhaps carry around with them. Even if it doesn't exist so much around them, they still have a feeling of being excluded, and perceived prejudice is almost as unsettling as actual prejudice.
Personally, I don't like to talk too much to the actors about the camera choices because I feel like the way I want them to perform is as if it feels very rooted in the real world and that I'm essentially stepping back and just watching and hoping they feel safe with me watching.
If you don't have money or you come from a background that doesn't have money, it's harder to achieve your ambition in life. It's not that you can't, but it becomes harder. Inequality is one of the worst things that can exist in our society, so I am interested in those kind of things.
My straight friends accept I'm gay but they forget that some people don't. Even now, if I go into a party, people don't usually assume I'm gay, so you have to keep coming out. And if you say you've got a film with a gay subject matter, you can sometimes see people's eyes going, 'Oh! OK!'
I think the gay community is made up of so many little different things, different parts, different people... I think that can be quite hard for people. You think you've found your tribe, but actually, that isn't your tribe, and then you have to keep searching for what kind of makes sense.
No relationships are perfect. When they develop, there are things that have happened before in your life that you maybe don't discuss. And there are always fault lines within every relationship. I believe it doesn't take too much pressure to be placed on those fault lines for them to start cracking apart.
I think it's always interesting to me how we keep secrets from the ones we love the most. You could be so close to someone, but still there was something you can't express, you can't tell them, because it's almost too painful and too hard for you to articulate yourself, because you don't fully understand it.
Being gay, you're kind of forced to ask, I suppose, very existential questions from a very, very early age. Your identity becomes so important to you because you're trying to understand it, and, I think, from the age of, like, 9, you're being forced to ask questions... that other kids maybe don't have to ask.
I love the fact that James Ivory made films about Britain, made 'Howards End' and 'The Remains of the Day,' or that Paul Thomas Anderson made 'Phantom Thread.' They're about Britishness, but they're from an American perspective. And I actually think they're fantastic in the way that they understand Britishness.
I've traveled a fair amount around the country and visited many states. It's amazing that Oregon is so different from Idaho; even though Portland isn't that far from Boise, it's a completely different city. Colorado is very different from Oregon. From a European perspective, I've always found that fascinating about America.
You can achieve one thing, but because of that, you have to adapt or lose something else. If you end up in a relationship, you sometimes have to lose the closeness of your friendships, for example, or you have to move away somewhere... For me, that creates the sense of melancholy which I think exists in most people's lives.
Of course everyone should have the right to get married. But I think people need to remember sometimes that we don't all need to be the same. There's thousands of different types of relationships that people can have, whether it's completely monogamous or it's not monogamous, or they're married, or they're single or whatever it is.
If you're struggling, it's easy to feel powerless until you take control of it and assert what you want. I can understand that feeling. I can understand how it feels to be alone, to not want to get help from people and to not trust people who are actually wanting the best for you. I feel like that's true for a lot of people, actually.