Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every film is hard to fund.
Movies are romantic fantasies.
I'm a version of the same person.
By 1988, I was living in New York myself.
Fighting bitterness can be a full-time job.
Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.
As a gay person, my life has been marginalized.
New York grabbed me too hard, as did adulthood.
There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.
For me, every film is actually a form of documentary.
To come to change, there had to be conflict and pain.
I think there's a fear of difference in American cinema.
I've been hiding crucial events in my life since I was 13.
As a father, I wanted to make a movie that my kids can love.
You can be aware of the passing of time without being nostalgic.
My films might have been queer - because I was - but they were not gay.
For gay people, we learned about our lives in secrecy and a lot of fear.
All of my films have been autobiographical - it's all I've got to go on.
What's interesting to me is the distinction between my old life and my present life.
Intimacy is something to be cherished, and intimacy is not something to be afraid of.
Without community events like NewFest, I don't think we'd have a queer cinema in America.
People, for reasons of kind of security, they tend to move towards people like themselves.
Utopia is something that I think about in connection to an experience I had when I was a kid.
I'm interested in what actors reveal about themselves through the structure of the character.
Everyone wants to belong, and everyone needs to belong in order to make a career on some level.
I've been close to two or three couples, gay and straight, who have been together for 45 years.
A lot of what I think I do as a director is try to give everything over to the actor. So I disappear.
I do love the young adult novels as a form and genre, because it has a purity of intention and heart.
Most simply but profoundly, I chose to live an honest life, which I think as a gay person is not a given.
Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.
My early films were about self discovery, and films of internal conflict. At that level, they were very personal.
When working on and writing a film, I'm often more of a sponge than other times, aware of what's going on around me.
I could not - and I still cannot - see a sustainable career as a filmmaker in which I focus fully on our gay stories.
I realize I have strength as an artist and professional by embracing my difference instead of what makes me the same.
As a filmmaker, you realize that places have character based on their history as much as a face does or an actor does.
For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.
I've always been interested in how the individual comes to know and accept him or herself, which I think has been hard for me.
You can understand why good publicists go on to run distribution companies: because the creativity involved is complex and nuanced.
I got into filmmaking in order to tell very personal stories, and in this day and age, the opportunity seems all the more precious.
The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films.
As I've gotten less righteous, less pedagogic, I have become more loving of the artificiality, the art form, the imitation of life in film.
I grew up thinking there was something called 'independent film,' which I wouldn't necessarily have had access to if there wasn't Sundance.
To me, honesty and the difficulty of honest communication are at the heart of both my life and my movies. The difficulty of being yourself.
I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.
I have been very influenced by the director Maurice Pialat, who I continue to be in conversation and conflict with and get inspiration from.
I conveniently was not accepted to film school, which I applied to in 1987, and so I decided I would become a filmmaker instead of a student.
Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.
All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That’s what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.
All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That's what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.
You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear.