Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To make films, it always begins with two words: what and how. First of all, you have to find a story, or what are you going to tell? And you have to find a way to tell it visually.
I think that's one of the reasons it's nice to leave out a lot; it can become a lot more personal to people if there is room for them to put their own experiential time track on it.
A lot of my work comes through accidents or circumstances that just happen to present themselves. I have to realize that something is presenting itself. Otherwise it slips right by.
I was seeing a lot of really good things about Get Shorty when it came out, and my wife pointed out that if you validate the good reviews, you also have to validate the bad reviews.
When we first started, everything was animated, everything was comedy, and there was really nothing that was longer than about two minutes, because that's all audiences would watch.
It's impossible to make a movie out of 'Naked Lunch.' A literal translation just wouldn't work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country of the world.
I guess television is so much on the word. It's so much closer to playwriting - the scale is more just about the voices and the internal lives. Movies, it's a very different canvas.
When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!
In early 1983, Gary Goetzman and I went to see my favorite band, the Talking Heads, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The show was like seeing a movie just waiting to be filmed.
I probably I went into my room alone [when I was six] and I was just like, how have I even, how can I even continue on this earth with this terrible, terrible knowledge [about sex].
Openness, transparency - these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt... and that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done.
[James] Baldwin said the real question is not when there will be the first Negro president in this country. The important question is what country he's going to be the president of.
I honestly do feel like the Yakuza film genre is going away. And I don't personally feel like there's any meaning in trying to artificially extend the life of the Yakuza film genre.
That's a very Japanese idea - that children are an extension of their parents. And that when you're reborn, your new form reflects the sins of your previous life - you can't escape.
I believe that when people try to live their life at the fullest, there's a certain laughter that comes out of it. The more they try to live their life seriously, the funnier it is.
The last Christmas movie I really liked was 'It's a Wonderful Life,' probably. It's sort of a schmaltzy movie, but it's not without its dark moments. It still gets to me every year.
The last adventure left on this planet is creativity because we've been everywhere. There's not much left to explore. But there's a lot of exploration left in the human imagination.
Everything is entertainment; criticism is now entertainment and it seems that the French directors have woken up one day and suddenly realised that they were not backed up any more.
In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.
When I brought 'El Topo' to New York, no one understood the picture. But John Lennon understood. John and Yoko Ono, they presented 'El Topo' in the United States; they introduced it.
I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa's dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between "us" and "them" to arrive at a "we."
The more unique your film is and unusual it is and difficult it is, the harder it is to get it financed. That's why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television. They do HBO movies.
The crazy thing about independent filmmaking is that you're so judged on your first film. It almost needs to be one of those groundbreaking 'I've-never-seen-that-before'-type movies.
For me, I think [art] exists in a cave. I am in a cave. I have my own editing place, but I'm not powerful enough to amass the resources to keep doing movies every two or three years.
Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.
There is about as much educational benefit to be gained in studying dolphins in captivity as there would be studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary confinement.
At certain points, I was afraid there was something - a missing chink of skill - that was going to prevent me from having a movie that was financially successful. That frightened me.
Feminists believe that men and women should have the same opportunities. If you are a feminist you believe in equal rights as a whole. That’s not a concept you can really shoot down.
For straight, hetero people it's very easy to unintentionally say something that might not honor people's identities fully, and Grace Dunham is a really amazing educational resource.
I was thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we can just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we got something here.
I'm so happy when someone does something original, and there's no focus group or planning committee. If the cinema doesn't get an injection of that once in a while, we're in trouble.
It's so difficult to actually come up with ideas that you really fall in love with, you know? That's the most difficult thing about filmmaking - and that's my main challenge in life.
That's part of being a real citizen: always questioning your leadership, not only about what it is doing in your own country, but what it is doing elsewhere. Because it is connected.
Over and over again-in the movie, I have nine different people who have worked for Fox News network who have come forward and talked on camera, three of them anonymously, by the way.
I have a massive phobia for schedules and calendars. I need people to tell me where I need to be. I can't bear to see it in black and white. I think it's a fear of being pinned down.
I had developed this habit of writing scenarios as a hobby. I would find out which stories had been sold to be made into films and I would write my own treatment and then compare it.
It's not my goal to make so many movies. It's just sort of a natural process, and I'm just doing my job. And I'm not tied to any genre; I'm willing to do anything. I just keep going.
All black women aren't sassy, loud, difficult, or subservient. We are, in fact, very complex and very diverse, living very complex and diverse lives. That point cannot be made enough.
I don't understand the iPhone. I just don't get it. Don't ya'll have to write serious emails throughout the day? How can you possibly manage detailed missives on a phone with no keys?
When I was out promoting 'Selma,' I became aware of so many other films that ought to be getting distribution. And this is a problem I can do something about because of my experience.
A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot.
As a filmmaker, I ask questions but don't have answers. Moviemaking is a philosophical exploration. I invite the audience to come on the journey and discover what they think and feel.
I don't mind writing so I didn't find that difficult, it's just a question of finding the time to do it. I kind of like the direct connection with the fans actually, it's pretty neat.
Brian Eno records and music became a huge obsession of mine in college, in a way that a pop song can provide solace. I don't know if it's shallow or silly, but it meant so much to me.
I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make.
I’ve always been better at informing the audience through images than through words, but I took on a script that was so dialogue intensive, that the words had to do all the informing.
I've always been better at informing the audience through images than through words, but I took on a script that was so dialogue-intensive, that the words had to do all the informing.
The changes are part of my writing process. When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.
And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
In the late 1980s the amount of German films was down to four or five percent of the market, and the remaining 95 percent were American. It is now 20 to 30 percent German productions.