Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My entire life can fit into a knapsack.
It's hard. It's hard to get a film made properly.
I think I approach things with an outsider's perspective.
A lot of the time, excess on a film set is just damaging.
I am attracted to anything that does not feel derivative.
I've never even watched one of my films since they're completed.
I do have that compulsion to organize moments into a larger thing.
It's amazing how much you will forgive if the behavior is truthful.
Adam Sandler in 'Punch-Drunk Love' is brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant.
A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics.
You make a movie and you'd like it to be appreciated, respected, embraced.
It's great making a film and having it embraced and seen. I really enjoy that.
Kubrick has a divining rod for the concealed, alienating secrets of characters.
I think it's fair to ask how truthful a film is as opposed to how factual it is.
I hardly read fiction; I mostly read nonfiction. I like to examine material things.
As a filmmaker, one tends to want to evolve evermore towards a place of independence.
The one thing I'll say is I was a quiet kid. Much more of an observer than a performer.
Honestly, my smartest business decision was to never do anything that I didn't love doing.
I don't know of a filmmaker who does not feel buoyed and lifted when their peers embrace the work.
My films are inquiries. I've chopped down all the signposts, I really resist taking moral positions.
For me, personally, the value of a film is not determined by a review, but the health of the film is.
Chemistry exists or it doesn't, and I think casting is a very underappreciated component of filmmaking.
If something is to be quietly powerful, it requires more balance than a film that allows for more freneticism.
If I had a dozen lives, one of them would involve really getting off the rails in India, heavy into meditation.
The silence of a room when someone enters with a gun is very different from the sound that room makes when empty.
Sometimes the facts can get in the way of the telling of a good story. But they don't get in the way of the truth.
I'm not going to take something based on budget and do something just for the sake of it. I want to make good films.
I'm interested in telling stories that add up to more than the entertainment of the story. That's what does it for me.
If you have a vision for something, things are navigable. If it gets fuzzy, then obstacles become much more formidable.
I think I am missing a gene that most people have to enable them to feel happiness about success and these kind of things.
I like to rehearse to the point we're in the ballpark, and expect that we're only going to get one proper take, more or less.
I am a tumbleweed. I don't have a company. I don't have a staff. I don't own anything - I've never owned a car or an apartment.
My nature is to try and look past apparent truths, to pull back layers and understand the psychological motives behind phenomena.
I feel like what I'm after is not easy for me to find, and to want it to be easy... it would be absurd for me to have that ambition.
I'm attracted to stories of people who don't belong together, who embark on something and find themselves in places they don't belong.
It couldn't be more satisfying to work on something almost anonymously for years, then to have it received affectionately with support.
I don't like sensationalizing events. Instead of making waves, I want to make everything settle, so we can see to the bottom of things.
There's really powerful and potentially dominating forces when you make a film that can harm it if you're incapable of orchestrating things.
As a filmmaker, you're looking to reveal something. When other people relate to it, it makes an otherwise lonely world a little less lonely.
I think when an actor feels like they're being watched with great sensitivity and a subtle eye and a nose for truthfulness, that has some effect.
The version of 'Moneyball' I pitched - and we made - is about a guy, Billy Beane, who thinks he's trying to win baseball games. But it's deeper than that.
If you find yourself considering a project that seems like a layup, then you're diluted, or that movie's probably not the right movie for you to be making.
I know what it's like to be genuinely intrigued and compelled by a story and to have a sense that there's an adventure to be had and a film to be conjured.
I think Will Ferrell is probably completely evil, the darkest of them all. He is known among comics as the dark knight. An evil, evil man and a dangerous soul.
I am attracted to these outsider characters who just don't belong anywhere, and who are operating in worlds they sort of don't fit, coupled with huge ambitions.
I am nostalgic for those man-behind-the-curtain days when someone could get away with impersonating Kubrick because nobody had any idea what Kubrick looked like.
I like to rehearse. We did a lot of rehearsals for 'Moneyball,' but it is really individual to the actor. It's not like, 'Here is my process, everybody. Fit in.'
I think, when I meet a person, in general, it's not my habit to conclude anything about people. Not completely. Even people you know well constantly remain open.
People are attracted to entertainment, for sure, or jokes, excitement and romantically heightened stories that might be false, but are still attractive fantasies.
There's always something happening in pretty much every moment of every scene of everything I've ever worked on in longform that's not being expressed or acknowledged.