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.
A lot of artists think they want anger. But a real, strong, bitter anger occupies the mind, leaving no room for creativity.
A film – especially when it’s a personal film – is going to hit somebody or it’s not. There’s nothing you can do about it.
My cow is not pretty, but it is pretty to me.
Surface cures are not going to get rid of the torment that’s inside.
A filmmaker doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don’t have to die to shoot a death scene.
Building a set is like building a place, but it’s a temporary place, because sets usually get torn down. Kind of unfortunate.
Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.
Consciousness-based education, which I am helping to promote, is basically the same education that good schools are giving today with Transcendental Meditation added for the students, teachers, staff, and principal.
Digital video is so beautiful. It’s lightweight, modern, and it’s only getting better. It’s put film into the La Brea Tar Pits.
Film can’t just be a long line of bliss. There’s something we all like about the human struggle.
Francis Bacon is one of my giant inspirations. I just love him to pieces.
In the world there’s a thing called collective consciousness. All of us billions of human beings together create that collective consciousness. With all the problems in our world, you can see that the collective consciousness is not so high.
Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there’s comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life.
I always loved smokestack industry, and I love towns or cities that have grown up around factories.
I didn’t really grow up listening to blues, because I grew up in the Northwest. It wasn’t really the center for blues.
The human being is like a light bulb. If a human being is super stressed, depressed and filled with negativity, this is what that human being radiates out into the world.
I don’t like Thomas Edison. I’m a fan of Nicolai Tesla.