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People cant help how they look.
I love working with actors. I do.
Some directors hardly talk to the actors at all.
I think success is a lot more healthy than failure.
Like everything, what compels one to put pen to paper is a great question.
Casting is everything. If you get the right people they make you look good.
One thing I want to say: I don't like victim stories and I don't write them.
A movie takes on its own life, and you have to respect that and be open to it.
The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence.
Artwork can be a portal, a kind of rethinking and reseeing of the world as we live it.
I always make mistakes and I always fix things up, as best I can, in the cutting room.
I always have to presume that each movie is my last movie because I never know if I'll get money again.
So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.
But anonymity is very important to me, and I don't want to be recognized in public more than I already am.
Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.
Usually the audience has no idea that the censored version of whatever movie they're watching isn't the original.
Compromise is part and parcel of making a movie. It's a question of the kinds of compromises that you have to make.
I've always said that I myself am not the best audience for my own work, because I'm just not that receptive to comedy.
I can't please everybody and I don't try to. If I can please myself that's enough. For the rest, I just hope for the best.
When I go to the movies, I do like to see things that surprise me, a little bit, in ways that seem truthful to the world that we live in.
Well, so far, at least, my own ideas always take priority over those of other writers. As long as the well doesn't run dry, I imagine this will be the case.
In particular, people have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them.
When I'm asked who my audience is, I say someone with an open mind, which is not a vacant one and sometimes a liberal mind is not the same thing as an open one.
When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It's in real life that people are over the top.
Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can't celebrate humanity but I'm not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.
I love working with actors. If you cast the right person in the right part at the right time, they make you look like a better writer and director than you really are.
The funny thing is, strangers still seem to feel comfortable coming up to me and saying things, but now usually it's because they recognize me, and they say nice things.
The funny thing is, strangers still seem to feel comfortable coming up to me and saying things, but now usually it’s because they recognize me, and they say nice things.
I don't make movies with the idea that people are going to walk out of them feeling comfortable or better about themselves or more secure in their own biases or opinions.
A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.
It's one of the great gifts of having so little money that you are able to make these kinds of radical conceits that you could never afford to do had you had a reasonable budget,.
You always have to be ahead of the audience so that they have to always catch up and know the movie's not quite going exactly where you think it's going, or expecting it to be going.
All I mean is, I'm not the kind of audience comedy directors want at a test screening because I seldom laugh, and if I do, it's not very loud. That doesn't mean I don't like the movie.
Part of it has to do with this business of being approached in public. I have a distinctive look - it's partly the glasses I wear - and people seem to remember me once they've seen me.
And that's just what I'm saying. I would never want to be like certain people, who change the way they dress, go out in disguise, wear a big floppy hat and dark shades. I would hate that.
There are a lot of ideas I have that I think would be very marketable and commercial, but they're not as compelling to me as the ones that are unmarketable, uncommercial, and unprofitable.
Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters.
I mean, I don't want to sound - of course it's very nice, people come up and say appreciative things about my work. But the loss, in terms of privacy and anonymity, is no small thing to me.
If I grew up in a different background, I could see myself getting a gun and shooting an abortionist. That's my job, to imagine what could happen, what can make people go in different directions.
That is definitely a misunderstanding between me and a part of my audience. To be honest, I am often unsettled by the responses some people have had to my movies, and that includes many people who like them.
As Mark Weiner puts it, whether you gain 50 pounds or lose 50 pounds, whether you have a sex change operation for that matter, that it doesn't matter, that there is some part of ourselves that we cannot escape.
What makes me angry is the idea that people would be going to a movie because of what I said about it. It makes me feel, I don't know, arrogant, self-important, self-aggrandizing, whatever. Like I'm being used.
Storytelling is the only studio movie where the censorship is perfectly clear, the only studio movie with a big red box covering up a shot. I take pride in that - and, of course, in having avoided the fate of Eyes Wide Shut.
Optimism is not inherently a superior way of viewing the world. Certainly doctors will say it might be better for one's physical health to be an optimist. But, morally speaking it may not be appropriate in certain circumstances.
That said, be mindful, to someone who's never seen any of my work, it's just a movie with actors. So it's only those who of course know the earlier work that will see something is afoot, so to speak. But I don't want to intellectualize.
Casting is great fun, except for the business of it. I love the casting process. I love the editing process. I love working with the music. And even prep is very exciting. But once you get there and the clock is ticking, all it is is stress.
It is true that the movie is perhaps my most politically-charged. The story is thrust into motion by the idea of what do you do when your 13 year old daughter comes home pregnant. And not only is she pregnant, but she wants to keep the baby.
I mean, there are many other directors who are probably both more skilled and excited to adapt novels or work within certain genre conventions. I'd like to do that kind of work someday, but for better or worse I'm too drawn by my own material.
There can be a blurry line between laughing at the expense of a character and laughing at the recognition of something painful and true. But blurry as it may be, it is nevertheless unmistakable, and sometimes the laughter I hear makes me wince.
With Storytelling, at least, it's explicit: this is what the censors say American citizens, no matter what age, are not permitted to see, even though it can be seen by other people all over the world. I suppose you could call it a political statement.