Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.
If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.
It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.
Each one of us is a set of shifting molecules, spinning in ecstasy.
My films are about the little things that happen between people that are sometimes far more valuable and insightful than the big dramatic things that happen.
When I get depressed, or anything, I go 'think of all the music I haven't even heard yet!' So, it's the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?
I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.
Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?
I like marginal characters, I like real people. I learn more from talking to my plumber when he comes to fix my toilet than I do from meeting a movie star. I think my movies are in the same vein as that.
To me, everything is endless variations on other things. Like waves in the ocean. They continue to turn over on each other, and they're all slightly different. I don't know if originality is possible. Is it even necessary? Because everything is different than what came before, but it's all branches from the same tree. Originality is overrated, but what you do with things is always different.
I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.
Music, to me, is the most beautiful form, and I love film because film is very related to music. It moves by you in its own rhythm. It's not like reading a book or looking at a painting. It gives you its own time frame, like music, so they are very connected for me. But music to me is the biggest inspiration. When I get depressed, or anything, I go "think of all the music I haven't even heard yet!" So, it's the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?
It's a sad and beautiful world.
I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.
The beauty of ideas is that they are like waves in the ocean and they connect with things that came before them, and I think it is very important to embrace things that interest you and influence you, and incorporate them into what you do, as all artists have always done. The ones that say they don’t, are lying. Or are afraid that their work won’t be seen as being original, somehow.
I love silent films. The future is unwritten.
The beauty of a movie is that you walk in, you don't know anything about it, you enter a world that's new to you, and that's the magic of being transported.
I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.
When I studied with Nicholas Ray he was always telling us, "If you want to make films, watch a lot of films, but don't just watch films, go take a walk, look at the sky, read a book about meteorology, look at the design of people's shoes. Because all of them are part of filmmaking." So I thought, perfect! That's a good job for me.
One of our favorite Joe Strummer quotes was, "No input, no output." Meaning, we're going to hear a band, we're going to go to a museum, or we're going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We're going to get some input, because if we don't, then we have nothing. It's a circle. It's a respiratory thing.
Select only things to steal that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent
I like repetition, but I really, really like variations, synchronistic things that happen where you're not really thinking about them.
A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
