Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm guided by my enthusiasm.
Every film deserves its own unique look.
Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.
I was a Talking Heads fan from the very beginning.
I had had no aspirations to be a filmmaker or a writer.
If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something.
I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.
I was a sort of rock journalist - whatever that is - in London in the late '60s.
As a kid, a little kid I loved going to the movies, and now I love making movies.
As a kid, a little kid, I loved going to the movies, and now I love making movies.
A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things.
I don't think it's sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie.
I didn't go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.
I like seeing the cameras because it helps visualize how the music people and the movie people teamed up.
There's that rule: Don't show any of the other cameras. Why? Do you think the viewer doesn't think we filmed this?
I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.
I remember the Neil Young brand hitting me very hard immediately. He wasn't an acquired taste. I loved him immediately.
When you're working on a script, every word that's on the page, somebody has to read it. Make every word count in your stories.
The whole Orion zeitgeist, of treating filmmakers as partners, to me it's inseparable from the success of 'Silence of the Lambs'.
They're out there, this appalling idea that there are companies that profit - not just profit but profit enormously - through war.
'Neil Young Heart of Gold', that was a valentine to Nashville and country music in the Grand Ole Opry tradition and Hank Williams.
The occupied territories and the movement of settlements - moving people today off of their property and claiming it - is illegal.
It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.
I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.
Music films are great, but they can never compete with a live performance. Live music is what it is. It's the whole point. You experience it in the moment.
I've never had a good game plan. At a certain point, making independent films became more and more appealing to me because I like freshness and originality.
All of us who lived outside of New Orleans were horrified and heartbroken by what we saw when Katrina hit, the floods that followed the hurricane that happened.
In 'Heart of Gold' at one point, there were 23 players on the stage with him. And part of what's magic about Neil is the way he interacts with the other musicians.
I've always followed my enthusiasm. Whether the pictures have turned out good or not is one thing - but I've always had a lot of enthusiasm for the project at hand.
Maybe that's where the new art comes in - to somehow have your eye on the marketplace and harness your art to come up with something you can be proud of creatively.
I still go out, but not a lot. If I go to see music, it's usually to the Blue Note, jazz clubs, things like that. When I travel, I find out where the jazz clubs are.
I also feel that the only thing more gratifying than working with someone who you've worked well with is working with someone new and coming up with something great.
I love doing fiction. I love doing performance films and I love doing documentaries that don't have music. I love to shoot and I love to shoot things I'm enthusiastic about.
Extraordinary people are the Green Berets and the Navy Seals and the Olympic athletes - these are the ones who can face these extraordinary physical challenges and be triumphant.
In early 1983, Gary Goetzman and I went to see my favorite band, the Talking Heads, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The show was like seeing a movie just waiting to be filmed.
When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!
At certain points, I was afraid there was something - a missing chink of skill - that was going to prevent me from having a movie that was financially successful. That frightened me.
The media has not done a great job in fulfilling their role - journalism's role in a democracy is to provide information on profoundly important subjects so we're an informed citizenry.
I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.
Everything I've made - it doesn't mean they've all been good - but everything I've made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I've been really enthusiastic about.
It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film.
When we finished 'Stop Making Sense,' we went right to the San Francisco Film Festival for the world premiere, and people swarmed the stage and started dancing before the first song was even finished.
I get creeped out by Francis Bacon's paintings, and I can't say exactly why. They're all really disturbing, and there is an almost nimbus-like quality behind some of his frightening characters and stuff.
I've never fallen into what I consider to be a trap of trying to figure out something analytically that could be a very popular film. I would hope my enthusiasm could match up with something with that potential.
It was so easy for me to see that Anthony would be a superb Dr. Lecter because he had been such an amazing good doctor in 'The Elephant Man'. He had been as believable a doctor as you can imagine, and he was good.
I felt from time to time that shooting live music is the most purely cinematic thing you can do. Ideally, the cinema is becoming one with the music. There is little artifice involved. There's no acting. I love it.
When you're filming, if you can't capture the relationships and interplay, that magical thing that transpires between musicians during a performance, then you're not going to have a deeply interesting film. It's vital.
There is so much going on in our country and in the world today... We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there? Well, I'm turned on by that kind of stuff.
I've been making films since the '70s and trying to develop that best possible fiction-film style that I feel is the most expressive. At a certain point, I felt I was winding up making the same film stylistically and I found that boring.
By the time I got to 'Silence of the Lambs,' I was madly in love with close-ups because I'm madly in love with actors, and a basic premise of 'Silence of the Lambs' is the story about two people fighting their way into each other's heads.