Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Honest communication is a rare thing.
I'm not the guy to ask to write a sequel.
I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.
I saved every script I'd ever worked on as an actor.
As a television actor, I was held to a tight, rigid structure.
I believe in the Constitution - and I believe in common sense.
I was surprised by how much I liked 'Hacksaw Ridge' and its depth.
I've been in some bad TV shows and suffered through so much poor writing.
I work very hard to line up stereotypes and then smash them with a hammer.
I learned a tremendous amount about dialogue because I suffered as an actor.
I mean... directing is a holy, unpleasant experience, to be perfectly honest.
I sent 'Hell or High Water' to Peter Berg, asking if he'd like to be involved.
Unfortunately, there is still much to mine in this world and explore creatively.
I didn't know if I could make a good movie. But I knew I could make a respectful one.
I finished 'Hell or High Water' and started writing 'Wind River' literally the next day.
I had to push exposition through dialogue, which is really, really hard for an actor do.
People in Texas wear cowboy hats; they're good at keeping the sun off your neck and face.
To get a film in Cannes is a real honor. To have it play and not get booed is a real relief.
I'm a storyteller, and I was an actor, so I have a fairly thin grip on reality to begin with.
Until you've been to Cannes, it's hard to describe to someone the magnitude of that festival.
You can really examine the suffering and consequences that happen when there's a loss in a family.
There's not a lot of pure evil in the world, but it's amazing how little it takes to do great damage.
Most of us don't confront pure anything. What our life does involve is a whole lot of 60/40 and 70/30.
I think I was a decent actor, but it took a lot of work for me to make a choice on how to read a line.
Sometimes audiences want to see what we're doing to their world. It's our obligation sometimes to reflect it.
If you're going to make a sequel to 'Sicario', you have to - you know, you've got to go beat a brand new path.
I think that marriage of music and picture is so vital, especially in a film that's almost exclusively exteriors.
We can't assign beliefs to people who don't have a voice to express them. And we can't assume what someone thinks.
I let characters be human and flawed and relatable. When we do things that aren't that great, we can understand it.
As a filmmaker, you have to stand in front of what you did and make choices that you could do with a clear conscience.
While I feel it's important for films to examine our society, I don't particularly like watching the films that do it.
Bad people sometimes do good things, and good people do really bad things or do something the audience disagrees with.
I broke a lot of conventions. Look, I spent a long time as an actor. I spent a lot of time playing pretty ordinary arcs.
Violence is literally the glue of the cycle of life, and yet I think that we're the only species that does it maliciously.
To me, a purely good individual or purely bad individual, that's a comic book - that's a fantasy - and I don't do fantasy.
I don't write tracking shots in my screenplays or any camera directions, but I do try to give a sense of how the action is moving.
You know that saying, 'You broke it, you bought it'? With horses, if you don't make sure it's a good fit... they tend to break you.
I watched a lot of old movies. Clint Eastwood movies, a lot of John Wayne films, a lot of movies that celebrated the region of where I lived.
I like to describe 'Yellowstone' is 'The Great Gatsby' on the largest ranch in Montana. Then it's really a study of the changing of the West.
Part of our job as storytellers is to show people pockets of the world that they don't know. The more we understand, the more we don't judge.
I think my mission, if I could call it that, as a storyteller is to try and find ways to show how similar we are and not how different we are.
'Sicario' was successful, but it was successful because Denis and the producers were, you know, they were very lean. It was very lean filmmaking.
I don't know if I've ever met anyone that's purely good or purely evil myself. I think most of us live with some varying degrees between the two.
Josh Brolin is fascinating to watch because he is just so effortless. It's like watching a really gifted athlete run, and I just didn't have that.
I don't outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go back to the last place that felt like jazz to me.
You've been entrusted with a lot of money and a lot of careers, and a lot of people put their faith in me, and every director goes through that every time.
For me, the greatest thing a movie can do is rivet you while you're watching but also give you something to chew on for days and weeks after you've seen it.
'Kramer vs. Kramer' is one of my favorite films, where you have a story that really juxtaposes a lot of ideas that we have about family and about parenting.
I had a one-year-old son. How will my failure or success limit what he becomes? I was trying to write screenplays. It doesn't pay very well until you sell one. I was poor.
How does one endure in a place they shouldn't be condemned to live in? You could take that same question and apply it to any number of neighborhoods in any number of cities.