Everything I’ve written is personal – it’s the only way I know how to write.
People ask me all the time, “What are your influences? Are you trying to do Beckett?” It’s like, “No, I’m trying to do me.” Whatever that is. I don’t know what that is, but that’s the basis. I’m trying to be true and I’m trying to be honest.
We’re all subjective beings and trapped in our own realities and our own biographical stories and physical bodies and our histories – and that’s the only way we can experience the world.
I do like escapism. I like going to the movies on a Friday night and seeing something fun.
There are things that aren’t represented in movies that are a big part of everyone’s life. This is a movie about health and about the body.
I’m in my mind a lot. I live there.
Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true.
There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They’re all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.
I feel like I want to keep moving toward idiosyncracy. Personal, personal, personal.
There’s no way to approach anything in an objective way. We’re completely subjective; our view of the world is completely controlled by who we are as human beings, as men or women, by our age, our history, our profession, by the state of the world.
I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.
Do not simplify. Do not worry about failure. Failure is a badge of honour. It means you risked failure.
It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there’s no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can’t think of an exception to that.
I don’t have a style. I wouldn’t say I have a style as a writer, either. I know people have said “This is what he does,” but when I’m writing, I don’t think about that. I don’t think about a style.
And so not only do you have to make that work, you can’t really start putting the thing together in any form because some of the shots are very short and obviously many of them take so long, you’re waiting months and months and months before you can see if it’s going to be working emotionally.
Writing is a journey into the unknown.
I think directing and writing are very different jobs. Obviously, directing is a more social and managerial job. The other thing about directing is that it’s a very, very pragmatic job, and writing isn’t.
Every day of your life, you have information that enters your head, and that information informs your understanding of things, or shifts it, or changes it, or deepens it, or confuses you. Every day, every moment of every day – it’s like this thing that happens.
The difference between a movie and a play is that the production you end up with is the production. If a movie that I spent time on turns out to be crap, it’s never going to be made again.
Sometimes I don’t like the books that I’m reading.