For an artist, to be normal is a disaster.
In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.
In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.
The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, “Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema.”
I’m working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words, with material from my own life. I walk through life with my camera, and occasionally I film. I never think about scripts, never think about films, making films.
I’m not so much in the future as always in the present. The future always takes care of itself. What I do now with my video camera, it can only record what is happening now. I am celebrating reality and the essence of the moment. And that’s the greatest challenge that I have.
For me, to catch, to celebrate the reality and life and friends and everything around me the very moment it happens – that’s what is, that’s what I’m possessed by.
An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.
My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don’t pay attention to it when it happens.
We need less perfect but more free films.
In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!
The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.
You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.
Place means nothing to me. I can be at home anywhere.
Most of my videos consist of fragments, one or two minutes long. They are haikus or sketches. I have thousands.
I’m not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square.’ To continue it is senseless.
I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
I missed my teenage years. I was never a teenager.