I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.
I like making films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost into another world.
Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me.
Everything I learned in my life, I learned because I decided to try something new.
Don’t fight the darkness. Don’t even worry about the darkness. Turn on the light and the darkness goes. Turn up that light of pure consciousness: Negativity goes.
People say my films are dark. But like lightness, darkness stems from a reflection of the world. The thing is, I get these ideas that I truly fall in love with. And a good movie idea is often like a girl you’re in love with, but you know she’s not the kind of girl you bring home to your parents, because they sometimes hold some dark and troubling things.
Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.
I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.
The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it’s a little fish – a fragment of an idea – that fish will draw in other fish, and they’ll hook onto it. Then you’re on your way. Soon there are more and more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire.
It doesn’t do any good to say, ‘This is what it means.’ When you are spoon fed a film, people instantly know what it is. I like films that leave room to dream.
When you see an aging or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building there is no more magic to that building. But if it is allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added into it – it’s so organic.
If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.
That state of simplest form of awareness alone, is worthy of seeing, hearing, contemplating and realizing.
You can understand conflict, but you don’thave to live in it.
I love going into another world, and I love mysteries. So I don’t really like to know very much ahead of time. I like the feeling of dicovery.
You know what dogs are like in a room? They really look like they’re having fun. They’re bouncing this ball around and chewing on stuff and they’re kind of panting and happy. Human beings are supposed to be like that. We should be pretty happy. And I don’t know why we aren’t.
Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of – or because of – his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great – I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.
He whose happiness is within, whose contentment is within, whose light is all within, that yogi, being one with Brahman, attains eternal freedom in divine consciousness. BHAGAVAD-GITA.
I have the same answer all the time: My doctor told me not to think about these things.
But if you know that you’ve got to be somewhere in half an hour, there’s no way you can achieve that. So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen. There’s not always a lot of time for other things.