Film Directors From The United States

"The Iron Giant (1999)"

"Batteries Not Included (1987)"

"The Incredibles (2004)"

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook". But I realize — only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more."

"No capes!!!"

"While I was waiting for them I made a few more phone calls, one to Barbra Streisand, whom I haven't seen since my election. I met her in a restaurant during the campaign when she came up to me and said she had a young son and wanted to do something for peace. She gave a fund-raising event for me in her new house in Manhattan, did a show and radio spots for me, and even came out on the streets and campaigned with me. “Ya betta win,” she used to say. She was great, and I really feel indebted to her."

"In the heyday of Barbra Streisand, it's hard to remember that every Jewish teenage girl of my generation whose nose "looked Jewish" longed for another chance."

"I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me."

"Why the fuck don't you shut up and just sing?"

"Secretary Madeleine Albright was a good friend of mine for the last 28 years. I am so sad about losing a good friend and a great woman in this fragile world of ours. May you rest in peace dear one..."

"The world needs more people like Madeleine, whose instinct was to connect with others and build on what we share, rather than destroy lives and cities, like what’s happening in Ukraine today. Madeleine became very close to Colin Powell, her successor as secretary of state, who died last October"

"“Doubt can motivate you, so don’t be afraid of it. Confidence and doubt are at two ends of the scale, and you need both. They balance each other out.”"

"To have ego means to believe in your own strength. And to also be open to other people's views. It is to be open, not closed. So, yes, my ego is big, but it's also very small in some areas. My ego is responsible for my doing what I do — bad or good."

"A person who's a bitch would seem to be mean for no reason. I'm not a mean person. Maybe I'm rude without being aware of it — that's possible."

"Anybody who's ever been broken up with, or had their heart stepped on or ripped out of them; you question everything you've based your whole life on. It's like, is anything real? Cause nothing 's more real than that, and now it's gone."

"You find in life that there are different levels of being in love with someone, and maybe everyone doesn't find that undeniable, indescribable... I can't describe it, it's indescribable."

"Until now Gregory Colbert has been that rare artist who goes out of his way not to be noticed. He was represented by no gallery, he held no exhibitions for a decade, and he gave no interviews. He was in a sense a secret artist, though the secret was shared by a small group of wealthy private collectors who, through acquisitions and sheer enthusiasm, helped to finance his work. He needed this help. In his quest to photograph the mystical relationship between humans and animals, he made 27 lengthy trips to distant corners of the world over nine years. He was usually accompanied by a support team, supplies and equipment. He even rented oceangoing vessels for months on end. In brief, it was both costly and complicated to produce images of great simplicity."

"Colbert’s work feels timeless and sacred. It resonates with a luminous, essential wisdom speaking through the ages. . . . Colbert’s work operates in a parallel universe to ours, an earnest, refreshing, post-ironic world where pure wonder and awe still reside."

"If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings, you see how people were depicted inside nature, not outside it. It was a kind of dream time. That’s what I’m exploring."

"In the next 25 years, the human race will have to decide whether or not to preserve the bestiary of Nature’s living masterpieces. Ashes and Snow is not meant to tell people to do some things and not to do other things. It’s meant to inspire. I hope it’s not a requiem."

"The stars you see at night are the unblinking eyes of sleeping elephants, who sleep with one eye open to best keep watch over us."

"In exploring the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals, I am working toward rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals. The images depict a world that is without beginning or end, here or there, past or present. I hope that the overall effect is an experience of wonder and contemplation, serenity and hope."

"I have invented nothing. I have simply documented a magical alchemy that I want to share."

"I spent all my time at school in the library. Bad teachers can teach you to learn on your own."

"Nous avons besoin de renégocier notre contrat avec la nature. L'écologie est une force d'union qui peut diminuer l'intolerance et augmenter notre empathie envers les autres—avec les humains comme avec les animaux."

"The whales do not sing because they have an answer. They sing because they have a song."

"We need to renegotiate our contract with nature. Ecology is a unifying force that can diminish intolerance and expand our empathy towards others—both human and animal."

"He has realised a vision with an eloquent message, delivered without commentary or caption: if we didn't know before what we are obliterating, we do now."

"Unlike certain directors who fixate on marginalia, creating art in which the engraving on a character’s belt buckle takes precedence over the story, July’s seemingly superficial gestures service something greater: a pulsing emotional center. It’s odd that she has come to represent, for some, a kind of soulless hipster cool, because in July’s work, nobody is cool. There’s no irony to it, no insider wink. Her characters are ordinary people whose lives don’t normally invite investigation. So her project is the opposite of hipster exclusion: her work is desperate to bring people together, forcing them into a kind of fellow feeling. She’s unrelentingly sincere, and maybe that sincerity makes her difficult to bear. It also might make her culturally essential."

"The Future is really good, a film that’s not only tighter than the free-ranging Me and You but also more mature and tonally darker. (It’s literally darker, too: July shot it in a pastel-free palette of beiges and browns.) It may not convert all her critics, and it might shock some of her fans. But “The Future” should definitively dispel the lingering notion that her art is some gossamer, transient confection. The film is devoted to the only truths worth engaging, about love, sex and death, all questions unasked in the neutered, cutesy world of, say, Napoleon Dynamite and the like. “I do believe my work should be of service,” she told me. The Future is not just a rebuke to the idea that her work is somehow shallow; it actively attacks the idea of shallowness. July wants you to feel a part of something larger than yourself and, in The Future, you do."

"July’s film fits no genre, fulfills no expectations, creates its own rules and seeks only to share a strange, lovable mind with us."

"A recent profile in The New York Times Magazine depicted Ms. July — a quiet figure on the screen and a thoughtful, witty presence on the page — as an improbably polarizing filmmaker, as likely to be scorned for her supposed preciosity as celebrated for her ingenuity. And the first part of The Future seems, quite deliberately, to test the spectrum of audience response. Are you curious? Enchanted? Frustrated? All of the above?"

"What I like best is the kind of complicated messed up truth, you know … the one that's so imperfect that you know it's true."

"The magical, metaphorical strain in The Future is what makes it powerful, unsettling and strange, as well as charming. The everyday fears and frustrations that shadow us on our awkward trip through the life cycle often feel enormous, even cosmic, and Ms. July has the audacity to find images and situations that give form to those metaphysical inklings. … The complexity of “The Future” is contained in its title, which refers simultaneously to a terrifying abstraction — an unknowable territory bounded by death, eternity, the end of time — and to a concrete, trivial fact. What are you going to do next? It’s a huge, scary question, but the answer is usually to be small and specific. Use your imagination. Go see this movie."

"July’s unnamed narrator is a married artist with a young child — not unlike the author herself — who has just turned 45 and plans to mark the occasion by traveling alone from her home in Los Angeles to New York, temporarily leaving the domestic space to conjure inspiration for her next project. Instead of flying, she decides to try to become someone who drives across the country. "This could be the turning point of my life," she reflects. "If I lived to be ninety I was halfway through. Or if you thought of it as two lives, then I was at the very start of my second life." The splitting of one life into two. Another binary. She doesn’t make it to New York. In a move that rejects the traditional arc of the hero’s journey, she never even leaves California. But transformation happens anyway."

"Common sense and the truth should feel authorless, writ by time itself. It is actually really hard to write something that will make a terminally ill person feel better. And Positive has rules, you can't just lift your guidance from the Bible or a book about Zen; they want original material. So far none of my submissions have gotten in, but I'm getting closer."

"Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."

"I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered, again, It's not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told. I imagined couples at the altar, standing before the priest, declaring It's not your fault to each other, before kissing in the union."

"Since I started making art, I’ve always had some kind of project that was really about and for other people, because I think I just need that balance to feel sane myself — you know?"

"At this point, I’ve come to realize that where you are, the space you’re in, what you wear, this one body that you’re in for this life — those of course matter because you are really here, you’re not just an idea in your head. And there is something profound about noticing again and again that you’re here."

"I think, ultimately, my character comes to think that the desire for a shared dream, a shared fantasy, a shared world, was really an attempt at a recreation of a certain kind of childhood pain. Our relationships are built on our first experiences with our parents, so the idea that longing and fantasy and boundarylessness had been established then and didn’t quite function in an adult landscape was — I mean, it’s still quite slippery for me to talk about in this way, and in fiction I felt like I had a shot. You don’t have to be articulate, which I think is important — you can let characters be dumb and stumbling. That is what art can do that talking about art can’t."

"I guess my favorite thing in the world is when I look at a piece of art, or read a story, or watch a movie where I walk away feeling like "Oh my god — I have to do something, I have to make something or talk to someone — things are not the same anymore" — and so I try to make work where you come away with that feeling. It's like, yeah, you're thinking about what you just saw, but even more than that — you feel able, you feel like, kind of propelled."

"I pretended that I was pausing before telling him about the secret feeling of joy that I hide in my chest, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to notice that I rise each morning seemingly with nothing to live for, but I do rise, and it is only because of this secret joy, God's love, in my chest. I looked down from the sky and into his eyes and I said, It wasn't your fault. I excused him for the cover and for everything else. For not yet being a New Man. We fell into silence then; he did not ask me any more questions. I was still happy to sit there beside him, but that is only because I have very, very low expectations of most people, and he had now become Most People."

"That is my problem with life, I just rush through it, like I'm being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea I suck it down like I'm in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest."

"I wanted to make the movie feel like life feels to me — and life feels both sad and dark and confusing and more than hopeful — it feels like something totally incredible could happen at any moment and with no explanation."

"It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound."

"I think there’s something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It’s impossible to articulate, and it’s happening now, almost like a perverse secret. . . . That’s always sort of fascinating to me."

"I’m totally not kidding. … Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing."

"No one's keeping track — no one's making of an archive of these "unimportant" things, you know… but now we have an archive … and in a way, the second there's many, it becomes proof of something, something that's so unspecific — that it's — that it's lively — to me that's really alive — that kind of half nauseous, half beautiful feeling."

"Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful. Except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it. Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be."