Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't really collect anything. I grew up in a family that collected things and then they'd get sick and people die and then they have their basements full of stuff that goes from one box to the next, so I try not to get sentimental with stuff. I just try to collect memories.
We had all these smiley family pictures all over the walls of my house, but I always found those pictures to be odd because we weren't smiling all the time. I don't want to paint the picture of a total dysfunctional house, but there were a lot of arguments in that house. A lot of pain.
There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.
When I was a kid, I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war, and the other was that my parents would get a divorce; and when I was twenty, they split up, and I just felt like I needed to confront all those things that scared me as a kid - entering young adulthood and trying to have relationships.
When I grew up, a director was Cecil B DeMille, a guy sitting down with a megaphone speaking. He was the voice of God, the image of God. When I went to start making docs, I quickly turned the megaphone to my ear not to my mouth. It's more about funneling in the words and listening as doc filmmaker.
I don't really collect anything. I grew up in a family that collected things, and then they'd get sick, and people die, and then they have their basements full of stuff that goes from one box to the next, so I try not to get sentimental with stuff. I just try to collect memories; I guess that would be it.
I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone's scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that's how I write.
I feel like the job in editing is to let the movie tell you what it is. It's like sculpture. You just start taking away, you add a nose here, you cut off like the side of the cheek over here in the crease and you have a face. But it really reveals to you what it means to be over time, and if you have enough time.
I'm so sick of seeing guns in movies, and all this violence; and if there was going to be violence in Pines, I wanted it to actually be narrative violence. I wasn't interested in fetishizing violence in any way of making it feel cool or slow-motion violence. I wanted it to be just violence that affected the story.
With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.
You turn on the news, there're no facts anymore. 'Here's what's happening today,' and then you cut to thirty minutes of people in little boxes, little windows, telling you their opinions on it. It seems like all the news is going on in the ticker-tape on the bottom of the news. It's all opinion, it's all editorial.
My older brother gave me a cassette tape of Mr. Bungle, and I couldn't stop listening to it. I used to drive around Colorado in a Mustang II - it was when they got away from the muscle-car Mustangs, so it was sort of old lady. I couldn't go above 45 mph in that car, but I would drive around listening to Mr. Bungle.
Yeah as the director I consider myself to be the coach, and my actors are my players. So I have to show them how committed I am, but I also want to lead by example. I think whenever you make a film, you start out alone, and then slowly start - you have to be a magnet. You have to attract people to you, to the project.
When people think of biblical movies, they imagine sweeping epics like 'The Ten Commandments.' But 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' is essentially a documentary about Jesus. It made me aware of how real life and personal experience can create more breathtaking, sensitive cinema than more sophisticated techniques.
I feel like the job in editing is to let the movie tell you what it is. So again, it's like sculpture. You just start taking away, you add a nose here, you cut off, like, the side of the cheek over here in the crease, and you have a face. But it really reveals to you what it means to be over time, and if you have enough time.
Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world.
From making documentaries all these years, it doesn't feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I'm always trying to shoot as though it's really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I'm going to be following. I want to follow them. It feels dishonest to be pulling back in that opening shot and leading him to his destiny.
I love crosscut parallel storytelling, like we did in Blue Valentine. I love how Alejandro González Iñárritu has done it, and Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, and all the way back to D.W. Griffith - this parallel editing is an effective way to tell stories. It's like juggling, like keeping a lot of balls in the air and seeing how they come down.
I want to get out of the way of the actors. I want to get out of their eye lines. I want to them to stop thinking they're making a movie. I want them to just go and live. It's like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life, and just watch them swim. That's what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.
So I don't think being an artist you can ever satisfy - the moment you do get satisfied is the moment you're done, really. I'm actually starting to bug out now, because it's not enough. I get joy and pleasure in the movies out there in the world that people are seeing, but for me, it's about making it. That's why I do it, is to make it, to deal with my life.
Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world. You're just trying to make a love letter, a gift.
Sidney Lumet is one of my favorite filmmakers. I feel like his approach to filmmaking was always so human. He was always making movies about the people. He wasn't about the tricks, you know what I mean? From 12 Angry Men on. Another film of his which I really, really love is Prince of the City, with Treat Williams, which is kind of a lost classic. Lumet is one of those film heroes that changed movies for everyone.