Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I make something I can look at and say, "That's a good piece of work, and there's some terrific directing and acting in it, and you should be proud of it."
I film normal-life subjects in natural settings that some people would consider uncinematic. But what I want to show is nature itself, as the truth of life.
If we're going to be considered horror filmmakers, we have to prove it not only to ourselves, but to the audience that we can actually make something scary.
That's easy to answer: I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film.
At times I can't help going for visual comfort. Sometimes a picture fills up your head, and you try to move the actors around to make that visual statement.
So many times you see beautiful lovemaking scenes with a lot of exposure or an awkward lovemaking scene, but I think it's very rare that you see it private.
I can travel with music. I close my eyes, and I can travel all over the world with music. And one after another, stories come to me, and I just record them.
Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.
We can't worry about competition. Besides, you aren't competing with anyone but yourself. They have nothing to do with whether you make a good movie or not.
There are points where you worry that you might be putting too much in and alienating the audience. But, funnily enough, some of those fears aren't correct.
A father who sees his daughter leave in the arms of another man does not feel the same as a mother. It is heartrending for her, too. But it is not the same.
I like making black and white films in natural surroundings, but I much prefer shooting a color film inside a studio where the colors are easier to control.
Academically, I was never that interested. I skipped classes. My biggest dream was to have a coffee shop, but I had no idea how to get the money to do that.
Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas. But wood can translate ideas, too. You have wood and then you get a chair. Some ideas are for different things.
'Perfect Sense' is an extremely serious film, and I am an extremely serious film-maker who is trying to explore the medium in original and interesting ways.
We're talking to New Line. They've got a couple projects they're interested in me doing and I'm having meetings at MGM. There's a lot of available projects.
Look, pain is there in the world, and there's catharsis through that. I feel like there's... a rapture, if we can get through it, if we can confront things.
In hindsight, everything in my life looks a little rosy. But the reality is that with, say, 'Swingers,' when we finished, it was considered a total failure.
These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.
We live in a very litigious society. I've never sued anybody. I certainly can imagine a situation where I might sue, but it seems more or less in bad taste.
The way I go about making a movie... even the ones that are interview-driven, I go into them not knowing what's going to happen, and feeling my way through.
I'm one simple way I think I've succeeded was capturing Elsa [Dorfman]. There's something about Elsa, her personality, and her work that I believe is there.
I was terrible at maths, but I could grasp science, and I used to love to read about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor.
You can drain the life and nuances and complexity out of things by homogenizing them to make everything harmoniously dull, flat, conflict-free, strife-free.
There's something so wonderful about writing in rhyme where it isn't just the meaning of the words, it's the music to the words and the shape and the sound.
America is old tobacco: gold and green. It's lush and literally feels like wealth, like optimism, turn of the century America where everything was blooming.
There are so many ships in the animation sea that are computer driven, that I think we can have at least one that's just a log raft that we can row by hand.
I force myself to think of anything but the one thing that I'm actually always thinking about. And that is so exhausting that I sleep more than I ever have.
I get a little sick of these New Yorkers who want me to make some psychic thing, like 'The Left-Handed Gun.' They don't know anything about Western history.
Especially on unexpected journeys, you have time; you can figure certain deeper things out, like who you are and what you want. That's why I enjoy journeys.
Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.
The beauty of a movie is that you walk in, you don't know anything about it, you enter a world that's new to you, and that's the magic of being transported.
There's nothing better than being in an asylum, if you're going to have a bunch of crazy people in an asylum, and they're all beautiful Hollywood actresses.
Fifty years seems like a good anniversary. Even after I'm dead, how much better could I get than this? I mean, it's great, I'm not dead, so I get to see it.
I hitchhiked at high school. My parents thought was a perfectly normal thing to do even though God knows I got blown a lot of times riding home from school.
Pot came first when I was young. But I did the work. It wasn't a battle of what came first. They went together like "love and marriage, horse and carriage!"
Making a movie is difficult enough to sort of have a premeditated length that you're going for. I don't know a single filmmaker on the planet who does that.
History is often best told from the ground, out of a car window or in someone's kitchen, not through some huge production mechanism or grand framing device.
...it is curiosity, initiative, originality, and the ruthless application of honesty that count in research- much more than feats of logic and memory alone.
I think one of the great things is that when I got started, no one would return my calls, and now I get a lot of phone calls, which is good. I have options.
My very shy Punjabi father never taught me about the birds and bees. So shy was he that he may have thought he would get arrested for even talking about it.
Far be it from me to force anyone into either chess or dressage, but if you choose to do so yourself, in my opinion there is only one way: follow the rules.
I won't be able to do a film just for bad reasons, for money or for - I just can't. If I have one more where I feel I can bring you something, I will do it.
People are so accustomed now to social networking. Now everybody has custom-made news for him or her. So everybody is a content maker and a content reactor.
Art is where we make a stand. If we don't make it there, freedom of expression is lost for everyone - for artists, for journalists, and for everyday people.
Just make things, and find people you love working with. If you're working on something you truly love and are passionate about, you will do your best work.
I know I dressed way too provocatively when I look back. I was in that weird phase of feeling suddenly like my body was a woman's body and not a kid's body.
Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.
Well the thing is that the New York of 1846 to 1862 was very different from downtown New York now. Really nothing from that period still exists in New York.
Every year or so, I try to do something; it keeps me refreshed as to what's going on in front of the lens, and I understand what the actor is going through.