Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.
Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things.
The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.
You could say that spirituality is bliss, and bliss is physical happiness, emotional happiness, mental happiness, and spiritual happiness. And it’s intense. It’s an intense happiness. It brings you together with everything.
The greatest thing my father left me was a love for cutting wood – my love for sawing, especially pine wood.
There are only 24 hours in a day, and my top priority is working on my films, but I love short film experiments.
Transcendental meditation is like a car, a vehicle that allows you to go within. It’s a mental technique.
Every human being has consciousness, but not every human being has the same amount. The potential for each one of us human beings is infinite consciousness. This is called supreme enlightenment, and it just needs unfolding by transcending each day. The more consciousness we have, the better life is.
You’re right on the money with that. We’re all like detectives in life. There’s something at the end of the trail that we’re all looking for.
If we didn’t want to upset anyone, we would make films about sewing, but even that could be dangerous. But I think finally, in a film, it is how the balance is and the feelings are. But I think there has to be those contrasts and strong things within a film for the total experience.
Sugar does make people happy, but then you fall off the edge after a few minutes, so I’ve really pretty much cut it out of my diet. Except for cupcakes. I like those.
I was creative before I started meditating, but I had, looking back, a weakness. I wasn’t self-assured. I had a little bit of melancholy. I had a lot of anger for my situations in life, and I would take this out on my first wife.
A lot of music doesn’t do one thing or another. It just doesn’t do anything. Then there are those pieces of music that thrill your soul. It’s such a wide range, and it’s really interesting that we all love different things.
A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It’s a horror. I can’t really listen to the music. I’m not really concentrating on it, and I’m not really concentrating on the painting.
A poet could write volumes about diners, because they’re so beautiful. They’re brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically.
I felt I should have been the happiest person in the world. But I looked inside, and that happiness was only on the surface, not so deep. Beneath it was hollow. Up until that time, I had been thinking meditation was a joke, a fad and a waste of time.
Everyone is on the internet but they’re not all talking with each other. There are groups upon groups out there, but they don’t talk to one another. So while the internet brings everyone into a shared space, it does not necessarily bring them together.
An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It’s just you and your painting. To me, that’s the way it should be with film as well.
As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things – we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.
I’ve loved music always, and my music fire was lit by Elvis Presley, really, and all that was happening back then.