Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was not raised with films. And when Alain Resnais did the editing on my first film, he said, 'You should go to the Cinematheque.' I didn't even know we had one in Paris.
I turn on the TV sometimes, start watching something and think: 'This seems quite good, a bit familiar.' Then I realise … It's one of my movies. It's a pretty odd feeling.
It's famous that comedians have a very dark personal state of mind. I think, in my case, it's the same. The only way to get deep is to have a balance, or a counterbalance.
When you're a director, and you look at Scorsese's work, he's always challenging us to push the envelope and break the rules. Someone like that is necessary and a godsend.
So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point
I guess what's most surprised me in most of the reviews is that they don't seem to get the noir story in the dream sequence, so they analyze it like a straight noir movie.
My manager sent me the first two scripts for 'True Detective,' and I just thought they were so interesting and that the world they were depicting was so titillating to me.
I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.
In the story, which is only a few chapters long in Genesis, Noah never even speaks until after the flood - but when you have Russell Crowe, you're going to make him speak.
I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.
The hardest thing, as a director, is that it's never right. Nothing you do is ever right. It's never exactly how you envision it. Making a movie is about making it better.
I think that's my approach: If it feels right for a scene to be whole, to hold on without cutting for a long time, then that's great. But other scenes, they don't want it.
I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.
I love to champion some of the hardworking actors where, it's been said to me, they don't bring money. But to me, they bring everything. They bring their wonderful selves.
Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color.
I've worked really hard to build up a career on my own. I turned 30 recently and it took me a long time to get the chance to make a feature film and do it on my own terms.
We don't outline, so we don't have prospective tasks to divide up. It's just, we start at the beginning and talk the first scene through, write it up, proceed to the next.
I've been working with music videos and commercials, they are naturally very music driven and visual driven. So that feels like my natural element to be working with that.
As a writer and a director, I simply don't have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make because of the fixed and tight production schedule.
As movie monsters go, zombies are the most human. They were human at one time. So we are confronted with ourselves in a way, which is much more frightening and disturbing.
None of the films I've done was designed for a mass audience, except for 'Indiana Jones.' Nobody in their right mind thought 'American Graffiti' or 'Star Wars' would work.
Nothing is more pleasant for me than to be on location in the country that I love, in any of our western landscapes, being out there with a camp outfit and a film company.
In effect, I feel like a blind, deaf, and illiterate person working through the sensibilities and multiple, real talents of other people. Everything I do is collaborative.
I think comedy is drama, often. It's hard to have comedy over a period of time - commercials are one thing, but over a period of time - comedy and tragedy go hand in hand.
I only produce things that have so much in common with what I like. I wanna understand what I'm doing. I wanna understand the instincts that are going to inform the story.
When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was... an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted.
If you put up posters around town for high-school kids, high-school kids will come. If you're casting politicians, you can't put up posters and have politicians come down.
A scientist shouldn't be asked to judge the economic and moral value of his work. All we should ask the scientist to do is find the truth and then not keep it from anyone.
Something that I tell myself every morning when I wake up is like: "Think it over, take the time to think it over." I don't like spontaneity, there you go. I'm wary of it.
To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated.
For me, the most important word in cinema is the word freedom. For example, in Europe, we've got freedom, we've got the final cut and that's something which is marvellous.
With wok cooking, you chop things up into little pieces for maximum surface area, so they can cook in minutes, if not seconds. Sauteing is energy efficient; baking is not.
I really believe that if you're going to bring a child into the world, it's your job to parent that world. Especially if it's just you; you don't pawn her off on somebody.
I am fascinated by that notion of people are never as they seem. And that doesn't make them good or bad. It's just we don't ever really show ourselves if we don't have to.
Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.
Advertising was fairly simple work, and I really just wanted a job where I could sit and write every day and not get fired for it like I had at other jobs, but it was fun.
Sometimes people can't afford to work for you, or they're not interested or available, and you hate to have written the whole movie with somebody in mind and not get them.
I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.'
I never got along in school, really - I already knew what I wanted to do. I have never in my life got a paycheck from anywhere in the world that asked if I went to school.
I think that while you're making the film it's important to just keep your eye on the ball and make the best movie you can, and then realize that it's out of your control.
The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.
...everything in psychosocial evolution which can properly be called advance, or progress, or improvement, is due directionaly to the increase or improvement of knowledge.
Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory.
Whatever we take from a film - personal, public, private, subconscious - a list can only contain moments that are often a key to the recognition of something more complex.
The world is filled with terrible things that can influence children, and movies have depicted them since time immemorial. Should every terrible thing warrant an R-rating?
I always wanted to make a film that had this sort of Chinese-box effect, in which you keep opening it up and opening it up, and finally at the end you're at the beginning.
Competition impedes creativity because you present yourself in a way that's going to been seen by somebody outside of you. You're not very much yourself and it limits you.
The power of sound to put an audience in a certain psychological state is vastly undervalued. And the more you know about music and harmony, the more you can do with that.
When you finish a film, before the first paying audience sees it, you don't have any idea. You don't know if you made a success or a flop, when it comes to the box office.
I think optimism springs from nature. I'm a gardener. Nature has taught me about rhythm, the essence of every art. With so much that is terrible, nature gives me pleasure.