Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I still love Abba.
I taught myself filmmaking on my own.
I feel like I thrive in the red light.
Certain things just rub me the wrong way.
Motley Crue was actually my gateway to heavy metal.
I guess a little bit of delusion can go a long way.
1984 is such an iconic, loaded year in so many ways.
I want my films to be very tactile, visually and sonically.
Being compared to 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' is a huge compliment.
Me writing 'Black Rainbow' was me alone in a windowless room going insane.
I think most religious belief structures are essentially like mind viruses.
I realized the modern equivalent of a broadsword duel would be a chainsaw battle.
In the night there's sometimes a sort of cursed quality to the Pacific Northwest.
I think you have to be wise and know your limitations and know how to work within them.
Mythologies are violent things, and to be true to them, you have to go to primal territory.
The idea of creating a quote-unquote 'retro' world isn't all that appealing to me by itself.
I don't know anybody who goes horseback riding at sunset, but everybody watches TV and eats.
I've always liked the idea of merging esoteric art cinema with down-and-dirty exploitation films.
I don't know if I'm a sequels kind of person. I prefer each film to have its own unique identity.
I'm too neurotic to ever feel good. If I ever felt good, I think something horrible would happen.
The way people express themselves online, that's also how they express themselves in the real world.
I am not against it. But I am suspicious of all forms of New Age spirituality, and religion in general.
I feel happy working in the low-budget realm, doing stuff that is a little bit more esoteric, and personal.
The male ego is a terrifying, terrifying thing, you know? If it's shattered, it becomes even more dangerous.
I've had a VHS collection for many, many years. But I would prefer to watch a movie in the best format possible.
A lot of films mistake convolutedness for complexity. To me, a simple story can be a powerful spine to build around.
The last thing on earth I wanted to do was make a movie that plays directly to a sort-of frat boy audience, you know?
When I was growing up in the eighties, there was a real nostalgic streak for the fifties. Look at 'Back to the Future.'
Mandy' came from grief and depression. I wanted this to be an outward volcanic expulsion of the emotion of my first film.
Black Rainbow' is about control and your emotions being repressed and controlled, and 'Mandy's' about all a volcanic eruption!
I love to choose the right actors. It's kind of a pleasure to work with them and watch them imbue your concepts that you write.
When you're working with an actor who's prepared and brings it when you need it, it's just a very validating creative experience.
Just making 'Black Rainbow' was like my minimum requirement before death, so that I could die with some honour and not in total shame.
I just find there's nothing funnier and more scary than a delusional man who thinks they're the center of the universe, and in fact they're not.
I might actually be allergic to testosterone. Whenever I've felt a testosterone rush I get, like, sick afterwards, and I feel exhausted and terrible.
We moved around a lot when I was younger. I never really felt at home until we moved to Canada, but even then, I always felt strangely out of place and alien.
I think the first music I ever heard was Abba. I took my mother's cassette recorder and went into the bushes to listen to Abba when I was four or five-years-old.
My goal from the very beginning was to make very visually lush, juicy films that you can really sink your teeth into. That's always been part of my modus operandi.
I just love sitting in a theater watching a film and the grain is like boiling and it feels completely alive like an organism almost; like an organism made out of light.
In the '90s, I kind of put aside all those things I loved in the '80s and I got really into watching foreign films and art films and stuff like that, and sort of soaking those up.
If I'm going to sell out, I'm going to sell out all the way, so a bid by the studio would be if you're going to go through the pain of trying to make a film, it's gotta be worth it.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with heavy metal, Van Halen, Motley Crue. The older I got, my tastes widened. I always felt an attraction to the attitudes of punk; also punk filmmakers, like Richard Kern.
A huge part of my writing process is listening to music as I write, almost creating an unofficial soundtrack to the film I'm working on, a sort of playlist. But the specific songs change rapidly as I write.
I was, like, 'I really wanna see an Eric Rohmer movie take place in a Bert I. Gordon universe.' Where there's a story going on that's about, you know, loss and desire, but with a giganticized-animal element.
I think making a film is as much knowing what you don't like as what you do like, and avoiding the things that you don't like like the plague and making sure that they never appear onscreen in any shape or form.
My mother died in 1997 and I spiralled into this self-destructive vortex of trying to annihilate my consciousness. I was afraid to face the grief of losing her, because she was somebody I loved more than anybody else in the world.
Well, I think if you're telling a story, a three act structure will just naturally emerge out of it. But I also love it when a film doesn't feel like it's anchored too rigidly to that structure and you feel like anything could happen.
Well, I think it's important to have some kind of a narrative engine that pushes the audience through the landscape. But I love films like 'Apocalypse Now,' which is a very mood driven film. It's a magnetic force that's pulling them through.
There was a time in my life when I would literally go see every single film that came out in the theaters. No matter what. I just became obsessed with movies, and wound up getting drawn to the pulsating grain of film and the flickering of the light.
The way I work is I'll basically become kind of fixated on a very stripped-down genre, like revenge or something like that, and just start layering on top of that and entering in thoughts and ideas, and then the story just kind of builds up that way.