Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Maybe many directors are trying to create their own style of filmmaking, or to respond to audiences that come expect a certain style from them. But I don't care about that - I don't intend to have a 'Miike' style. I just pour myself into each film, enjoy it, and then what comes out just seems to have a 'Miike' style.
As a citizen I might be well-behaved and have nothing salacious or radical about me, I might be a total bore, but I might suffer somehow if other people are being spied on and blocked from doing important work that might have a collective benefit down the road. The personal doesn't necessarily translate to the social.
I like happy sets. Happy sets are good, and I think people feel comfortable on them. When fear arrives in any context it's just boring and it closes people down. If people feel inadequate or if they feel bullied... It might work for some people but I think, as a rule, it just takes any joy out of the creative process.
I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man... there is a tradition in the most simplistic of action movies for there to be some horrible villain.
I was very inspired by Les Blank's film 'Burden of Dreams.' I think what's unique about his film and the two I've made is that they're close examinations of filmmakers and how their own emotional experiences reflect in the material they're rendering, and vice versa - how that material sometimes colors their own lives.
Everybody has someone in their life that has breast cancer. It touches femininity, motherhood and sexuality and as Barbara Brenner says in the film, "you get to say breast out loud in public." Big corporations know this and market in a particular way knowing that women make most of the buying decisions in a household.
I think people crave those meaningful situations, stuff about faith, identity, dilemmas of live paradoxes in our souls. It's going back to a time where lives were really defined by history, and also how you behave in the face of history. It's kind of interesting to go back to that simpler humanity, simpler but deeper.
Only if you were lucky to be born in the right class, the one Donald Trump was born in, then of course you have a beautiful view of the world. You find that everybody else is an imbecile, because he doesn't think like you, he doesn't dress like you, he doesn't have the same girl as you, etc. But I call that ignorance.
Whether it's a professional, academic keeping people out by using certain mystifying language, or technologists presenting their work as incredibly complicated, no one can understand it (especially not "moms," who are always invoked as the ultimate know-nothings, which is incredibly insulting to a whole lot of people).
I'd be absolutely happy to go back and make a smaller picture. I never want my choices to be dictated by budget. That's one of the reasons why I take so much pride in being able to make films for $2 and a paper clip - because I can always get my hands on $2 and a paper clip. I never have to ask for permission for that.
There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen.
Theres something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gilded age, and the culture of individualism became a culture of avarice.
I think parenting well is not so different than trying to consider how to be successful at any relationship. Like, how do you partner well? How do you collaborate well? How do we have this conversation well? You know, you're always trying to figure out what "well" means, so I think parenting is another version of that.
I think if people who are attacking me or against me, if they would just watch one of my films, they would - they may not agree with me politically on all the things I'm saying. But they will know at the end of the film that I love this country and that I have a heart. And they'll have a good laugh throughout the film.
I don't see myself as a movie maker only. When I can do a picture, I do. But I don't work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live. I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.
Ultimately, the current argument is "not having net neutrality will hurt innovation," and you can make that argument, but I would rather make the public good argument, which is not just about innovation or nurturing new companies that will add to the nation's GDP, it's actually about creating a democratic public sphere.
There's something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gilded age, and the culture of individualism became a culture of avarice.
We must alert and organise the world's people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises - exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.
First of all, the American people are inundated with advertisement after advertisement of you buy, buy, buy. You've got to have the latest thing. The iPad 1 isn't any good anymore, you've got to have the iPad 2. The iPhone 4, now you've got to have iPhone 4S. Now you've got to have the 5b, now you've got to have the 6c.
The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'
A good script is like a work of art in itself. I've read hundreds of scripts, and good ones are very rare. If the writer has something to say, and a voice, and a plot that matches character, and an emotional trajectory that works, then I'd be an idiot to fool around with it. It's just that few scripts ever are like that.
We forgot that Martin Luther King, Jr. changed his discourse toward the end of his life because he understood that the real fundamental problem of this country was not just race, it was class. It was the economical situation of not only poor blacks but also the poor white part of the population and everything in between.
A big part of filmmaking, and a big part of the power of filmmaking, is creating characters that people fall in love with. So, those things, like the bloopers, create more reality and dimension, and the sense that these are not drawings or shadows, but they are living, breathing, thinking characters. That's the illusion.
The media companies control whether a candidate gets "coverage" - which itself is tied to the knowledge of how much he or she has raised. The networks then know how much money the candidate is likely to spend on commercial airtime buys - so, this is a reinforcing system of legal corruption and quid pro quo news coverage.
Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.
A big factor is that the enthusiast camp's values are really rooted in Silicon Valley and in these supposedly new business models. But again, I think this such an interesting moment because things like the NSA revelations are really forcing people to recognize the connections between corporate and government surveillance.
One of the first cassette tapes I ever purchased was the Rambo III score. I was not allowed to see Rambo, but my mom would allow me to buy the music, so I would listen to that score over and over and imagine the movie. But those limitations and not being able to access those things made me so much more excited about them.
I think any black woman is a queen. It's just, do you know it? Do you see it in yourself? Do you recognize it, do you abide by that, do you define yourself as that? Based on who we are and what we've been through and how we survive and where we stand, we are on kind of sacred ground. We stand on the backs of our ancestors.
I am not trying to say I'm a genius, but 'Underground' was the strongest attack there has been on Milosevic. It is about a man who locks his friends in a cellar for 40 years and convinces them that the war is still going on. He uses them, but they still think he is a great guy. And this was shown in every cinema in Serbia.
Who know what life is going to be like. I mean, there was no demand for the spaces before. It's not like people were flocking to Sochi before; they just didn't have enough hotel rooms and arenas to fill the need. So that's what we'll look at when we go there. But we'll wait a few years until things kind of return to normal.
I'm a filmmaker, but my working procedures are different. All my basic structuring is done during the filming. You know, how long I keep the shot, the exposure or the speed - slower or faster, etc. That's structuring. And then there is a second stage of structuring that comes later when I begin to put those pieces together.
Well, Pa, a woman can change better than a man. A man lives, sort of, well, in jerks. A baby's born or somebody dies and that's a jerk. He gets a farm or loses it and that's a jerk. With a woman, it's all in one flow, like a stream. Little eddies and waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. A woman looks at it that way.
The first scene I ever shot for 'Louie Bluie,' on that first day, I had never seen the camera before. I didn't know where to put it. I just knew what was strong about these guys and what I wanted to capture, so I tried to work backward from there and figure it out. Trial and error. Hopefully I got a little bit better at it.
This is the thing: Art is more important than making a show, something that amuses people. Art is something that needs to give to the public, to the actors, to the artist - to give something that makes life the paradise it can be. Life can be a paradise. Still, I believe that. Even if there is Trump, there can be a paradise.
One of the reasons why I created the podcast called the 'The Call-In' that we do through Array - because as a black artist, every time I sit down with mainstream media, I'm asked about issues of race, identity and culture. No one asked what they ask my white male counterparts, which is: 'Where do you like to put the camera?'
I felt like I was a writer, and I just thought filmmaking was the best way for me to express that, because it allows me to embrace the visual world that I love. It's allows me to interact with people, to be more social than fiction or poetry, and it felt like the right way for me to tell the stories that felt pressing to me.
I grew up in a secular environment, you know, in the '60s and '70s. My mother's family was Catholic, but you know, just very kind of conventionally Catholic. You know, nothing - there was nothing, you know, extreme about their version of religion. And my father was a free spirit, you know? He had no time for religion at all.
You could make the most beautiful film, and that weekend it's raining too hard on the East Coast, and no one goes out. Artists should have a chance to do it again. That's the challenge: Women artists don't get a second chance. People-of-color artists don't get a second chance. You're put in director's jail, and that's a wrap.
As I look back on my fondness for the outdoors, and specifically the elements in nature that I find visually stimulating, I am surprised at how often the theme of dead trees arise. I guess it's that each one seems to have a story of its own, representing many years of living through everything that nature could throw at them.
The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and it's never the same as written.
There's the internal rhythm within a sequence, and then there's the rhythm between the sequences, and that's extremely important in constructing the narrative. For example, you don't put two big dramatic scenes right next to each other. But you can use the rhythm of the transition shots; they can often serve a double purpose.
It's the same thing in a way with privacy. You can say "I'm not doing anything wrong, therefore this doesn't concern me," but what does it mean about our society if we're all being watched and recorded? The personal experience - negotiating this as individuals - doesn't describe the social reality and the broader social costs.
Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.
I guess, in a sense, 'Audition' was a film that gave me an opportunity that I hadn't had up until that point. So that's definitely one that is important to me. Then there's 'Visitor Q' that kind of taught me that there are some kinds of films that can only be made as low-budget films that really wouldn't work as anything else.
I have three kids. Now they're all grown up, but when they were little, every time I would start a new project, they would say, 'So dad, are you making a movie we can watch or one we cannot watch?' That's the kind of stuff they would ask. People around me - family and friends - usually know when to watch and when not to watch.
I have been so very, very fortunate in my life. I've met or been in contact with several of my childhood heroes. I've interacted with people all over this planet, and even though I couldn't possibly hope to remember all their names, I remember a photograph, a poem, a sound, a joke, kind words of encouragement. All is not lost.
The big change that's happened for me in terms of my own life and how outsidership is reflected in my work is that I used to feel extraordinarily isolated in my life as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to have intimate relationships. And so my central characters also were isolated and usually in quite a bit of pain.
After the Revolution in '49, all the films were propaganda. They serviced the government and carried the message that the government wants to relay to the people. But I think, in the last 10 years, because the film market is opening and there's an expansion of all the cinemas in China, it's now a lot like Hollywood productions.
Terrorists are not bad; they are limited by circumstances. They are human beings. I am very, very, very sad when they explode themselves and kill 40 to 60 persons. It's terrible. But also, I am sad for them, a young person who lost his whole life. It's terrible. They are limited by religion, by politics, by economical interests.
To go from the vision that we would all be free to express ourselves creatively because our material needs were being met, to this reality where nobody has money, people are unemployed, and the machines are harnessed by the lucky guys who Facebook or Google and we're supposed to be happy just to contribute content to their site.