Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Since I started making art, I've always had some kind of project that was really about and for other people, because I think I just need that balance to feel sane myself — you know?
A more normal, mature way to think about it [my work] would be, Oh, I work on multiple projects at once and they overlap, but the actual psychology of it is a lot more self-abusing.
Sometimes I feel like just to get all my own work done would be great. You always feel like you're behind, and they're six other things that you wish you could get to but you can't.
You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.
When I was in my early 20s, I was quite into Japanese animation. It's like the same thing that I end up always saying which is, imagery based stuff is the thing that really gets me.
There's something really emotional about not having any sound. That allows, I think, the audience to participate more actively and kind of imagine what are they talking about there?
We are all united by the phenomenon that we have a body and that body is universally the same, more or less. If we lose sight of that perspective, everything can desperately suffer.
The other thing is even the Jews in the course - even though metaphorically aligning themselves with Indians, and, you know, you have genocide aligning itself with another genocide.
I really value distinctive movies, movies that feel that they came from a person that was really something that they had conceived and they made and is a reflection of who they are.
I've directed things that other people have written before, and I've written things and given them to other directors. So I'm very versatile in terms of that, and I enjoy all of it.
When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience.
I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.
I didn't dream about being a director. I didn't know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morris College in Atlanta, Georgia.
I'm from the Midlands. I lived in London for 50 years, but I'm not sure that I think of myself as a Londoner. I can see that we're all metropolitan, whether we are Londoners or not.
I'm very used to working with first time actors - you can just look back at 'E.T.' with Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from 'Empire of the Sun,' who'd never made a movie before.
I wish I was less good-looking and more unpopular. Then I could get into politics and use my pent-up resentment about being ugly and unpopular to systematically destroy the country.
It's like getting into film - I didn't say early on, 'I'm going to become a filmmaker,' 'I'm going to show my work at MoMA.' When you start to think those things, you're in trouble.
I have always had an interest in performers who play against the most obvious of expectations and are able to find something secret, something withheld, and some level of restraint.
I couldn't find an actor to play Freddy Krueger with the sense of ferocity I was seeking. Everyone was too quiet, too compassionate towards children. Then Robert Englund auditioned.
You go through your career and you find people and cast who you love and you go through and keep them and you never want to let them go because you have a great repertory with them.
You just have to make sure you keep living your life, challenging yourself, putting yourself in unusual experiences, thinking about what you're interested in doing, and going there.
Despite the great advantages of digital video and the great ease of using the medium, still those who use it have first to understand the sensitivities of how to best use the medium.
I thought it was a classic David and Goliath story, and I was fully onboard Team WikiLeaks. I was very pro the leaks, barring the redaction issue. But I see WikiLeaks as a publisher.
In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.
I knew early on that I was a nerd and that films were my refuge. Those first few minutes before the lights went off, and you're alone in the theater waiting, were really pleasurable.
The thing about working at Pixar is that everyone around you is smarter and funnier and cleverer than you and they all think the same about everyone else. Its a nice problem to have.
I like the platform to show your art and everything that goes along with that. To show your voice and hopefully find films that are more politically driven, films that maybe inspire.
My grandmother was a huge western fan. She'd have me watch with her. 'Shane,' 'Bonanza,' 'Duel in the Sun,' I saw them all with her. I used to watch them until the TV turned to snow.
When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.
What always made me proud - almost blushing with pride - is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that 'The Conformist' is their first modern influence.
The only people who really love the '80s are millennials. We had Reagan and Bush for our entire youth, the culture was terrible, the fashions were terrible, the movies were terrible.
We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion where you empathize and then you're frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.
Everybody expects you to be qualified to talk about your films, but in a way, you're the least qualified person to talk about them. When you're finished, you don't watch them at all.
Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.
All my movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.
When there's no technical problems, if you did the right casting, and the scene is well written, the actor will give you a strong performance with his intuition right from the start.
I'm interested in the kind of anti-establishment ethos that goes with making an independent movie. I like to bring that to studio films - usually to the consternation of the studios.
I don't know if subconsciously there was some reaction going on, if there was something in me that didn't want to learn an instrument - because I couldn't have been that incompetent!
There have been recorded cases of people learning how to fly a plane after playing a flight simulator, but there's never been a case of someone learning to fight by playing 'Tekken.'
What's great about documentary genre, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary."
I don’t have anger towards women. It’s the first script I wrote, I was really young. I got older. It’s told from an angry point-of-view. Young men are crazy strange emotional beings.
When you go to a film set, of course you're going to do your job, and you're excited about being there, but you somehow feel fatigued that you are just doing this day in and day out.
Definitely my favorite cut is the one that got put out. That's my favorite version of the film, the one that I put in theaters. That's my directors cut, there's no question about it.
I am not the kind of director who sits in a chair smoking a cigar talking with a microphone to 10 assistants. I need to move. To touch. To put a painting on a wall. To arrange a set.
I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.
I'm married to an artist. I get a lot of inspiration from art, from the lighting in art, from the compositions in art, from the textures, and all of that. I'm always playing with it.
The sciences are the 'how,' and the humanities are the 'why' - why are we here, why do we believe in the things we believe in. I don't think you can have the 'how' without the 'why.'
Having been an educator for so many years I know that all a good teacher can do is set a context, raise questions or enter into a kind of a dialogic relationship with their students.
But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
As I grew up, I always refused to cook Indian food very vehemently, and to this day, I don't cook chapatis at home. I'd always say, 'Why do I have to do it? Why don't the men do it?'