Don’t avoid the cliches – they are cliches because they work!
The best way to truly understand narrative art is to experience it.
I regret not the things I have done, only those I have yet to do.
I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.
Everyone seems to think that digital technology devoids the medium of content, but that is not true at all. If anything, it broadens the content.
As a group, we are stronger than we are as individuals. We start to think we want everything for ourselves and we don’t want to help anybody else. We want to succeed, but we don’t want anybody else to succeed, because we want to be the winner.
Any society begins by realizing that together, by helping each other, you can survive better than if you fight each other and compete with each other.
Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don’t use it, and we don’t adapt fast enough, we won’t survive.
One of the most telling things about film school is you’ve got a lot of students wandering around saying, “Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a move.”
After you’ve done the first feature, then you have heck of a difficult time getting your second film off the ground. They look at your first film and they say, “Oh well, we don’t want you anymore.”
The easiest job you’ll ever get is to try to make your first film. That’s the easy one to get, is the first film because nobody knows whether you can make a film or not.
I made lots of movies while in school while everybody else was running around saying, “Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish they’d give me some film.”
Suddenly everything came together in one place. All my likes, everything I actually seemed to have talent for was right there. I said, “Hey, this is it. I can do this really well. I really love to do it.”
I am more of a visual person than a verbal person. For me, I think, the excitement is the fact that I found a way of telling the story as I want to tell it, in a medium that I could master.
A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal and something you can lose yourself in – something that you can start at 9 o’clock, look up from your work and it’s 10 o’clock at night.
I was always extremely curious about why people did the things they do.
There wasn’t anything in my life that was going to stop me from making movies.
You have to have a thick enough skin to cope with the criticism. I’m very self-critical and I have a lot of friends that I trust who are film directors and writers and people in my profession.
The older you get, the less seriously you take criticism. I’ve gotten to a point now where I ignore it completely. It’s just not relevant to me anymore.
Over time I began to realize that the level of cinema criticism in the last part of XX century in the United States was pretty low. The institution itself is not what it’s supposed to be, and I realized that I didn’t need to take that seriously.