I love John Ashbery. He's the - really the poet laureate of English language poetry, whether he's given that or not, he is to me.
In Hollywood Westerns even in the Thirties and Forties, history was mythologized to accommodate some kind of moral code. And what really affects me deeply is when you see it taken to the extent where Native Americans become mythical people.
I find it very odd that the amendment about the right to bear arms, laws that were written so long ago, still pertain and don't get adjusted properly. Because the right to bear arms doesn't mean automatic weaponry designed specifically for human combat.
[Kenneth Koch] taught children in public schools in New York City to write poems and told them down worry about rhyming, don't worry about any of that stuff. You know, write a poem where you mention three colors and make it five lines - or he would just give them, you know, little strategies. And, man, they wrote some great poems.
I visited Paterson many years ago - 20 some years ago as a kind of day trip because of William Carlos Williams, because of Allen Ginsberg having lived there. And I went to the Great Falls and sat really in the exact same spot as Adam Driver does as Paterson. And I walked around the factory buildings, and I was rereading - I was reading at the time the epic length poem "Paterson" by Williams.
The filmmaker Amos Poe was a huge inspiration for me by making guerrilla-style punk films on the streets of New York and - well, it's just a lot of painters and artists and filmmakers all within that scene, and it's very, very important to me.
My first film I made, "Permanent Vacation," we shot in 1979 for like $12,000, part of which I got a fake car loan for that Amos Poe told me you could do that. And, yeah, I had no idea what I was doing. It was just like, well, we're going to try and do this. Partly because I had been following Amos Poe and Eric Mitchell around for about a year, and I worked on some of Eric's films as a sound recordist and stuff.
If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.
I'm still trying to learn how to do it, I'm still trying to figure out how to make films, but, yeah, it started then [in 1979].
I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there.
I'm like a navigator and I try to encourage our collaboration and find the best way that will produce fruit. I like fruit. I like cherries, I like bananas.
I didn't get the degree because in my last year, for my thesis film I made a feature called Permanent Vacation and they'd given me a scholarship, the Louis B Mayer fellowship and they made a mistake.
I started working with friends of mine and that, to some degree, continues.
I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.
I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.
I love rehearsing because in rehearsals there are no mistakes, nothing is wrong, some things apply or lead you to focus on the character and the things that don't apply are equally valuable because they lead you to towards what does.
If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.
I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.
For me, the music is always like the small rowboat I get into at the very beginning of my process.
Stupid f***ing white man.
When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me.
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