Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To jump from the indie ranks to play with the big dogs, there's a gate you have to pass through.
I'd like to quit thinking of the present as some minor insignificant preamble to something else.
One minute you're starting left fielder, hitting home runs; the next, it's career over. I was 20.
We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.
I remember playing for coaches who seemed like military-type guys. It always rubbed me the wrong way.
I do find myself at the moment, due to the success of School of Rock, to be on people's radar a little.
I'm a huge Nagisa Oshima fan. He was one of the most radical Japanese directors to come up in the '60s.
I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors.
I'm kind of an old theater guy, so I'm sort of attuned to it. Like, when I go to New York, I go to plays.
I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn't know would never get financing.
The rules of parenting have changed. By the modern definition, we were a generation of neglected children.
As a teenager, I wanted to write novels. By college, it was theater, plays, and then, shortly, it was film.
My dad's chill. He's the guy who, you wreck the car, he says, 'Well, nobody was hurt. It's just some metal.'
I remember daydreaming out in the outfield: I wish I had more time. I want to read 'The Brothers Karamazov.'
The worst thing is that you used to be able to show interesting films on campuses. Those places are all gone.
There are so many great artists, I think, who kind of suffer from being icons, legends, acknowledged masters.
Yes, but Hollywood is the strangest place in that they'll torpedo their own film to prove an emotional point.
Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn't bad. It's a good lesson in human hubris.
I did The Newton Boys and during the whole process of making the film, I may have spent a week in Los Angeles.
I've never been a guy who had more than a toe in Hollywood anyway, so my toe is more easily lopped off than most.
Are any of us self-taught? It just means I didn't go to school for it. But you do have teachers. You have mentors.
I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American.
Every college player thinks they're on their way. But, delusions aside, I might have toiled in the minor leagues for a bit.
The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you're still friends with the rest of your life.
I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.
No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.
I guess I don't have a grandiose view of the world in general, and I never believe it when someone else has a grandiose moment.
I don't see the arts as competitive at all. It was a better angel of my nature. Sports is zero-sum: winner, loser, demonstrable.
I'm lucky that I get to jump around, do a big-budget comedy and then a smaller film. I don't even make a big distinction between them.
Your friends are really an extension of your vision of the world. It's kind of a physical manifestation of how you feel. Like your soul.
When you have a film that's acclaimed, there's a tendency to go big or get serious or something, but I had an impulse to do the opposite.
I'm not enough of one of those public personalities who feels as though he's been one-dimensionalized. I don't feel that strongly enough.
I'd like to see people get sued if they wrote a bad review of my movie. If you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.
A certain kind of film is a big theatrical film and a certain kind of film isn't. It doesn't bother me so much that you can pick your format.
It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism.
If you want to just make a good movie, if you don't enjoy every step and become a master of each little moment, then you shouldn't be doing it.
I grew up in a little town in east Texas where it was really not on the table to question certain things like whether you should eat meat or not.
I'm the kid who wanted to grow up and be Bugs Bunny. I was very, very disappointed when I realized I couldn't grow up and be a cartoon character.
I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.
I've made movies where people say it's their favourite, but they don't take it seriously because it just didn't seem to break through commercially.
I realized a long time ago that, even as a kid, it's all about the choices you make, the things you pursue. In the end, you're a sum of your choices.
I really do remember everything. I see people I haven't seen in 20 years, and I can talk with them about what we talked about outside the high school.
The human psyche creates structure. We all go through our lives like, 'Oh! And then I moved here.' We're pattern-seeking, structure-producing machines.
The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything.
Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There's a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.
I like films that just put you in someone's world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you'd care about them.
I've always been interested in the industrialization of our food; it's been an issue for me from an environmental and animal rights and human health perspective.
I think people forget how radical the narrative of 'Slacker' is. There's no story, you know? We could go from one character to the next to the next and never return.
Ulrik Ottinger was the most real and experimental of all the German New Wave directors. She was probably the most out-there, too. She's a fascinating artist in that world.
I always think that I’m still this 13-year old boy that doesn’t really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll really have to do it.