Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Music Box has proven itself in a few short years to be a cutting edge distributor with a sophisticated understanding of both the market and cinema.
Secrets make for good drama, and revealing the hidden truths and contradictions of life is, for me, one of the most exciting aspects of making movies.
I think it's interesting: What is the generational effect of the experience of being a gay person in America? For my generation, it was very difficult.
I remember being a teenager and seeing Seymour Cassel across a crowded room and being incredibly star struck, and not having the courage to say, 'Hello.'
I started making movies in the early '90s, a few years after I discovered 'the cinema' during a three month stay in Paris during which I watched 100s of films.
I like a film that makes the audience feel like they are in the middle of life as it is moving, and in a way, they are catching up. They are thrown into things.
Every time you make a film, you create a world. You make decisions about sets and costumes, and you create a universe connected to reality, but not reality itself.
I'm not interested in a film about deceit anymore. I think I was always invested in deceit on some level. But it no longer compels me the way it did for so many years.
I've made four films about the destructive nature of relationships, of secrets and lies, and I think I'm no longer interested in that subject - which is a wonderful relief.
I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make.
I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.
'How to Survive a Plague' is history-telling at its best. It's a film I'll show my two children, now toddlers, when they are old enough to understand. It's a movie that I cannot forget.
I think I tend to feel discomfort more when I anticipate or arrive upon moments in which I need to be careful. As a gay person, there's the fear of violence, and we're not making that up.
The praise helps on a deep level, which gives you the grounding that encourages you to trust yourself. On another level, each film is a risk, and the praise doesn't save you from that risk.
I'm someone who can create critiques of individuals based on their economic history. That's one way I look at people in terms of one story that could be told purely in a Marxist construction.
To be a creative person and be a professional, as an artist you have to be able to withstand pain, rejection, and for some, a lot of bad feelings, but you have to be able to look through those.
Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York.
I think my movie addresses the struggles of communities facing class distinctions, which are timeless. The questions of how we live together and what we do for money are really the stuff of drama.
I always hope that people feel less alone when they see a movie that I make. That some part of the story played out on the big screen will resonate for individuals in the audience in a way that gives them comfort.
I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.
I don't rehearse with my actors... the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on... Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that's allowed... so you film reactions; you don't create them.
I have a career now, and I have to say, five years ago I didn't. I'm 50, and you never know what works, but I think part of that is because - in this way that can't be defined but which can be examined - we cannot work alone.
So there's a choice that I made to tell stories that are still psychological melodramas about domestic issues. The challenge is to figure out how to make 10 films a career as a filmmaker, and that's a really challenging thing.
I can be incredibly angry with someone, I can be incredibly critical, but... I went through a period where I was reading a lot of memoirs of guards in holocausts and serial killers. I like to understand why people do bad things.
I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood.
One of the biggest things that happens to many people when they have kids is that you suddenly realize that you're not going to last forever. You know there is another generation who are the heroes of their own stories, and that is humbling.
As independent filmmakers, we are actually deeply dependent on each other. The Spirit Awards are a public expression of those bonds, the intricate set of relationships and histories that we filmmakers depend on to make our most personal work.
I think as a gay person, there was no way in my generation to not grow up with shame and a sense of being wrong. It was impossible to avoid. Externally, you might make choices that are very public and very open but internally that was a struggle.
I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time.
I've worked with non-professional actors, I've worked with movie stars, I've worked with kids, I've worked with older people, and I've found my job as a director is to cast them well and to understand what they need on set to bring the material to life.
My father moved out to Park City in in the mid-'70s and lived in a Winnebago behind a hippie joint called Utah Coal & Lumber that was one of only two or three restaurants at that time. Park City was a sleepy little mining town, with not a condo in sight.
What I loved about 'Goodfellas' is that it's a film about bad behavior - but told with great energy and without judgment - but it doesn't actually shy away from the consequences of that behavior in the characters' lives, which I think is similar in 'Keep the Lights On.'
I try not to articulate ideas in the film once I've arrived on the plot and the characters. I believe that if I focus my attention with enough compassion and heart on those things, then other things will be revealed, and that's from the education that I've had from the novel.
Capturing intimacy is pretty much the only thing I'm interested in. That's what excites me and what I find beautiful in movies personally - that almost obscene sense that we shouldn't be this close to these people. I find that very inviting and meaningful as an audience member.
I love a certain kind of acting style that I would call non-American, which tends to be more detail-oriented and less externalized. There's a kind of naturalism that I often find in non-American actors. I also find that quality in the American actors I work with, but I like to bring in those influences creatively.
I tend not to think that anything I happen to be reporting on in my films is special. Meaning that people are always saying to me, 'you must love New York, you have it in all your films.' But mostly it's because I know New York, and I know Brooklyn at this time. I know the lives there, because I have lived in them.
I think parenting well is not so different than trying to consider how to be successful at any relationship. Like, how do you partner well? How do you collaborate well? How do we have this conversation well? You know, you're always trying to figure out what "well" means, so I think parenting is another version of that.
The big change that's happened for me in terms of my own life and how outsidership is reflected in my work is that I used to feel extraordinarily isolated in my life as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to have intimate relationships. And so my central characters also were isolated and usually in quite a bit of pain.
I try to keep feeling what's going on and try to use the camera, the actors and the design to enhance those feelings. There's something really emotionally direct and honest about how I put the material with the images. You hope that the strength of mise-en-scene comes from an honesty towards the material. You also hire really well.
There was an age in which it was clear to me that my parents weren't perfect, but then there was an age at which I had empathy for that. And that was through therapy, probably. You have to rebuild and you also have to grow in your understanding of whatever it is your parents are facing, and that takes a major, profound shift of perspective from being a child.
I make films that are very personal, and I always have. It's kind of the only thing that I think I have to offer as a filmmaker: the intimacy I've had with experience in a particular world, so the film comes from things I've seen and things I've felt. It gets transformed by the process. 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.