Film Directors From The United States

"Q: So, why do you write these strong female characters? A: Because you’re still asking me that question."

"Hello, I'm the writer and director. Now take your clothes off and get on top of Morena."

"I think that people need two kinds of fulfillment — one in which you give and one in which you hold back. Part of fulfillment is need, is longing, is being unfulfilled, that’s the nature of tragedy and a lot of drama. Very often, what the fans want, they get. But very often, what they want, they can’t quite have, because we want them to feel the way our characters felt..."

"There is nothing more painful in the world than Aly when she makes her big eyes. She makes her big hurt eyes, there's nothing you can do. She just kills you."

"The greatest expression of rebellion is joy."

"Get out of my BRAIN!"

"Joss: Um, no. Dead Buffy's a Buffy. But a dead one."

"SENTINEL: Is dead Buffy actually a robot?"

"People with real power never fear of losing it. People with control think of little else."

"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."

"The actors can make up their dialogue. I'm bushed, and they're all funny, and the hell with it. Maybe I'll give them a premise to work off of, like "You're all in trouble" or "Wash has a thing". They could maybe light it too."

"I know there's been some debate about the DVD art. Just remember it's what's INside that counts, as I used to remind girls in high school constantly. CONSTANTLY — until I realized that I was empty inside. Empty and homely. Man, that's a rough combo."

"Stay crunchy, even in milk."

"If I made a series of lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming to the party, and it would be boring. The idea of changing culture is important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium."

"I believe the only reality is how we treat each other. The morality comes from the absence of any grander scheme, not from the presence of any grander scheme."

"I don't actually have anything against anybody, unless their belief precludes everybody else's. … I am an atheist and an absurdist and I have been for many years. I've actually taken a huge amount of flack for that."

"Veronica solves little puzzles because she, like all of us, cannot unravel the bigger ones."

"Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way they really are. That there is some sort of truth to the whole thing, if you could just get to that point where you could see it, and live it, and feel it ... I think it is a long, long, way off. In the meantime there's suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities, and it's people kind of going in circles. It's fantastic. It's like a strange carnival: it's a lot of fun, but it's a lot of pain."

"There's this beautiful ocean of bliss and consciousness that is able to be reached by any human being by diving within, which is really peaceful and harmonious and can be enlivened by the group process. This group is a peace-creating group. It saturates the atmosphere. This is all about establishing peace. Right now, we gotta get peace back in the world. Peace is a real thing."

"Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too."

"My cow is not pretty, but it's pretty to me."

"I'm not a political person. ... I don't understand politics, I don't understand the concept of two sides and I think that probably there's good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there's a middle ground, but it never seems to come to the middle ground and it's very frustrating watching it and seemingly we're not moving forward. Some change, simple, simple really, relatively speaking, and we're going forwards somewhere, you know? It could be a beautiful place. There's many little obstacles and there's many, many people that are just opposed and we're not going forward."

"A film is its own thing and in an ideal world I think a film should be discovered knowing nothing and nothing should be added to it and nothing should be subtracted from it."

"I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school ... For me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude."

"Every single thing in the world that was made by anyone started with an idea. So to catch one that is powerful enough to fall in love with, it is one of the most beautiful experiences. It's like being jolted with electricity and knowledge at the same time."

"When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home ... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite."

"The beginning dictates the direction and you never know where you're going to go ... the mood is what you're looking for, and somehow we always find it."

"In film, life-and-death struggles make you sit up, lean forward a little bit. They amplify things happening, in smaller ways, in all of us. These things show up in relationships. They show up in struggles and bring them to a critical point."

"When you're an artist, you pick up on certain things that are in the air. You just feel it. It's not like you're sitting down, thinking, "What can I do to really mess things up?" You're getting ideas, and then the ideas feed into a story, and the story takes shape. And if you're honest about it and you're thinking about characters and what they do, you now see that your ideas are about trouble. You're feeling more depth, and you're describing something that is going on in some way."

"I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead."

"The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that much. That's a real sickness to me. That's a real sick thing."

"All the movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds."

"Speaking in front of a large crowd is not pleasant. Once it gets rolling, it's okay. But beforehand, it's murder. I'm getting a lot better. The first interview I ever did was in 1972, I believe, and I couldn't speak. I couldn't speak one word. I only said, "I painted it black." That was my one sentence. And so I have improved."

"The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity."

"I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular."

"The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it."

"I don't really understand how Errol got drawn to these gothic themes that interest him - maybe that he lost his father."

"You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite."

"There's the Mike Wallace approach, or you can call it the Michael Moore approach, which is the adversarial approach. In the end, that is not in the service of finding out anything. It's in service of dramatizing a received view: Namely, "This guy is an asshole, and now I will illustrate how this guy is an asshole by showing his inability to answer the questions I put to him." It's not what I'm about. It's not that one approach is good and the other is bad. They just have different valences. I like confrontation as much as the next guy. I'll give you the best example I can think of for why I like my method. [During] my interview with Emily Miller, one of the wacko eyewitnesses in The Thin Blue Line, she volunteered that she had failed to pick out Randall Adams in a police lineup. It wasn't me saying to her, "Emily Miller, how come you failed to pick out Randall Adams in a police lineup?" Why? Because I didn't know she failed to do it, because part of the trial record said she had successfully picked him out. When I heard this, not in response to some adversarial question, just her telling me her story, I asked her, "How did you know you failed to pick out Randall Adams?" She said, "I know because the policeman sitting next to me told me I had picked out the wrong person and pointed out the right person so I wouldn't make that mistake again.""

"I gave someone a perverse argument not so long ago about why advertising is better than movies. You want to hear it? Movies operate from a really disingenuous premise, that people are heroes. I know a lot of people and have had an opportunity over the years to observe them. Are they heroes...? Let's put it this way. Advertising tries something simpler and more believable: Products as heroes. I guess the idea is: When all else fails, put your faith in conditioner."

"You know, I have this version of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. God, in expelling Adam and Eve, kind of felt bad. He had gotten very angry, right? You know, you get angry and then you feel, "Well, maybe I overreacted." So, God was in that kind of mood when he expelled Adam and Eve from the garden. But his hands were tied. He had to go through with it; he had made the decision. God doesn't want to constantly second-guess himself. But he thought, "I know. I'll give them self-deception. Things are going to be truly horrendous out there, but they'll never notice.""

"Correct me if I'm wrong here, but truth is something that arises out of the relationship between language and the world. If I look at a picture alone, it tells me nothing. In the previous incarnation of this lecture, I was going to put a picture of the Titanic and the Lusitania up on the screen. They look very, very similar - four smokestacks. They look almost identical. You look at either picture, true or false? Neither. Put a caption at the bottom of one of them, that changes everything. If you put in the caption, "This is the Lusitania," and the picture is a picture of the Lusitania, then the caption is true. However, the picture itself is neither true nor false. It's just a picture."

"Listening to what people were saying wasn't even important. But it was important to look as if you were listening to what people were saying. Actually, listening to what people are saying, to me, interferes with looking as if you were listening to what people are saying."

"I like to think of myself as the ultimate anti-postmodernist post-modernist. Notwithstanding the unusual narrative or visual devices that appear in many of the films, what have kept me going for the three years of investigating [for The Thin Blue Line, was the belief that there answers to questions such as, Adams did it, didn't he? Or Harris did it, didn't he? That it's not just up for grabs. Today, I believe there's a kind of frisson of ambiguity. People think that ambiguity is somehow wonderful in its own right, an excuse for failing to investigate. What can I say? I think this view is wrong. At best, misguided. Maybe even reprehensible."

"I believe that historical analogies are always wrong. This a long discussion, but, to me, the most dangerous thing about Chamberlain's capitulation to Hitler at Munich is not the fact that Munich happened and it led to further Nazi aggression and so on and so forth, but that the example of Munich has been used to support thousands upon thousands of bad policies and inappropriate decisions. LeMay called JFK's recommendation for a “quarantine” (that is, a blockade) in the Cuban Missile Crisis “worse than Munich”. Would nuclear war have been a better alternative? But nuclear war was averted by Kennedy's policies. And thirty years later the Soviet Union collapsed without the need for nuclear war. Was LeMay right? I don't think so. But again, the example of Munich was invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq. Appeasing Saddam, appeasing Hitler. The use of the Munich analogy does not clarify, it obscures. History is like the weather. Themes do repeat themselves, but never in the same way. And analogies became rhetorical flourishes and sad ex post facto justifications rather than explanations. In the end, they explain nothing."

"Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Really? Human nature being what it is, isn't it hopeless to expect that we can do better regardless of whether we remember anything or not? And what if what we remember leads us to false analogies and misunderstandings? I prefer: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility." Or how about this: "Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.""

"I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end."

"I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not."

"When I first read the dictionary, I thought it was a long poem about everything."

"Steven had a great line. They were askin' us "What's it like as a comedian in front of 80,000 people?" And Steven said "If you're swimming in the ocean, it doesn't matter how deep the water is. All you can do is swim.""