Movies touch our hearts, and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things. They take us to other places. They open doors and minds. Movies are the memories of our lifetime. We need to keep them alive.
There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.
Every scene is a lesson. Every shot is a school. Let the learning continue.
Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.
Always stay open to surprise.
Your job is to get your audience to care about your obsessions.
Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.
More than ninety percent of directing a picture is the right casting
I always tell the younger filmmakers and students: Do it like the painters used to...Study they old masters. Enrich your palette. Expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn.
I love movies - it's my whole life, and that's it.
There's a way that the force of disappointment can be alchemized into something that will paradoxically renew you.
Music and film are inseparable. They always have been and always will be.
You have to put yourself in a situation, a lifestyle, that makes you do the work. Even if it's a monastery.
There are two kinds of power you have to fight. The first is the money, and that's just our system. The other is the people close around you, knowing when to accept their criticism, knowing when to say no.
We’re face to face with images all the time in a way that we never have been before... Young people need to understand that not all images are there to be consumed like fast food and then forgotten – we need to educate them to understand the difference between moving images that engage their humanity and their intelligence, and moving images that are just selling them something.
The most important thing is the script.
In truly great films - the ones that people need to make, the ones that start speaking through them, the ones that keep moving into territory that is more and more unfathomable and uncomfortable - nothing's ever simple or neatly resolved. You're left with a mystery.
If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?
I'm often asked by younger filmmakers, 'Why do I need to look at old movies?' I've made a number of pictures in the last 20 years and the response I have to give them is that I still consider myself a student. The more pictures I've made in 20 years, the more I realize I really don't know. And I'm always looking for something or someone that I could learn from. I tell the younger filmmakers, and the young students, that do it like painters used to do—that painters do—study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn.
The storyboard for me is the way to visualise the entire movie in advance.
When I'm making a film, I'm the audience.
I look for a thematic idea running through my movies and I see that it's the outsider struggling for recognition. I realize that all my life I've been an outsider, and above all, being lonely but never realizing it.
You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.
The first element that I connected with was the emotion. Sorry, that's how it goes.
There are times when you have to face your enemies, sit down and deal with it.
