Film Directors From Canada

"My journey to become a polar specialist, photographing, specializing in the polar regions, began when I was four years old, when my family moved from southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland. There we lived with the Inuit in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people, where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families. And in this community, we didn't have a television; we didn't have computers, obviously, radio. We didn't even have a telephone. All of my time was spent outside with the Inuit, playing. The snow and the ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my teachers. And that's where I became truly obsessed with this polar realm. And I knew someday that I was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it."

"Aliens is an amazing thing in my pocket, a landmark thing. On my gravestone it’ll say, “Well, his career wasn’t that great, but he did Aliens.”"

"I promised myself in life that I would not stop myself from being surprised and you never know what’s going to surprise you. Some things that seem dull turn out to be the most interesting things so I just open doors and say let’s do it!"

"I’m just one of those guys you know. I lived in England for eight years, I lived in America and I live in Canada. It’s sort of Canadian syndrome. There’s a whole bunch of British actors like that too, where you go, "I think I know that guy, I’ve seen him a million times but I have no idea what his name is." It’s that kind of thing, I don’t know if that will ever change but that is what my life is."

"I do eclectic projects. I went from Joan of Arc to Hitler to human trafficking, and they all had its own rewards."

"We’re always a victim of our fears, if we can convey them and have people understand them, maybe we can help them protect themselves from their fears."

"I’m an actor’s director, I love to make the environment safe enough for an actor to make a mistake to fall on their face, to let them know that they’re safe, that I will pick them up, that I will help them through, because really for greatness, you have to be willing to fall down, you know? You have to be able to let it go and take the ride and to be present in yourself and to speak your specific truth."

"You take somebody on a golf course and their character defects and shortcomings come out. That’s how I picked my manager, my accountant, and my lawyer. You get someone who hits a bad shot and who goes crazy, and throws the club, you want him working for you? You want him to represent you? You get someone who hits a bad shot and who goes “how can I correct that? Do you have any ideas?” That’s the guy I hire. But also, I work all the time. I don’t take big vacations. Sometimes, a golf game is the only thing I get."

"Sci-fi was always understood to be politically based. It’s a way of setting up a political message in a format that people can digest. If you tell somebody “That person’s a liar,” they can say, “No, I saw him last week and I trust him.” But if you make them a reptile and give them the same information, they’ll say, “Yeah, he’s a reptile. They all lie.” That’s the great thing about sci-fi."

"I think a lot of my work is about un-shaming things or de-shaming things."

"That was a life lesson to me. Because, yes it's important to take back those choices and be who we are un-apologetically, but we should always think of it in the modern context and what makes sense for our lives today, and to not be fundamentalist about anything. (as an answer to using a modern tattoo technique on herself, as opposed to a more traditional technique)"

"The dictionary doesn’t have individual contributions. It’s like building a cathedral. The workers are unknown. But one of the things I tend to do is suggest that it might be interesting to have examples of things that aren’t from France. If it’s a wind, which we worked on recently, does it always have to be the mistral? What about the winds of elsewhere? How about zephyrs or siroccos? In French, there exists an enormous variety of classifications, proverbs, and witticisms about winds. There are winds that push ships as well as winds that come from the gut—the noisy, bodily winds of Rabelais. All shadings have to be in the dictionary."

"How I began to write is different than how I became a writer. They are two different things. Many people write but they do not become writers. To become a writer is a job. It involves planning and it affects all parts of your life. Even what you eat—being a writer means not eating food with too much rich sauce to avoid taking a long afternoon nap! It’s like being a professional athlete. And a writer must choose between being a sprinter who writes a book, and being a writer who creates an oeuvre. If you want to create an oeuvre, you have to be careful not to put all your energy into the first book. You have to have a vision for the long term..."

"They were human beings who had a life, who had a lineage, who had parents, who had children, who had lives. They were not poor or rich. They were people and these people had humanity. So it was important that someone who knew them write about the event…"

"It's not often you see your city falling down in front of your eyes. People are screaming in pain all around you. Children are running in the streets. Some people start talking about the end of the world. But writing, for me, was as important as taking care of the injured."

"I like to be with my partner in the bed, to ride my Norton - and maybe it doesn't like me, and that's why I'm on the floor so often -, to play sports, to be with my friends and chat. And nature. It's wonderful to be lost in the desert, or between the waves over a surf board. I'm a life lover."

"Getting his picture taken doesn't rank high on Reeves' list of favorite things. It never has. But he looks up and smiles when a pair of comforting hands rest on his shoulders: They belong to Carrie-Anne Moss, his longtime costar from the Matrix movies, positioning herself behind him for the shot. There's an ease between them that comes from 20-plus years of friendship — a friendship that began in the late '90s when the pair met on the genre-redefining sci-fi film that turned out to be so influential, it single-handedly introduced phrases like "glitch in the Matrix" and "red-pilling" to the pop culture lexicon... Moss calls their connection effortless. "We've been through this experience together as partners," says the actress, 54. "The only way I can describe it is like a soul friendship." Their unique bond made 1999's The Matrix what it is today, and The Matrix, in turn, changed the course of moviemaking on the eve of a new millennium... Before Moss and Reeves change into their next outfits for the photo shoot, they slip away, catching up on each other's lives since making Resurrections. They push through the studio's back exit, flooding the darkened room with afternoon sunshine. Fans of the films might immediately think of the door of light, a portal Neo would use to slip into the digital "backdoor" of the Matrix."

"If you're a lover, you've got to be a fighter, 'cause if you don't fight for your love, what kind of love do you have?"

"It's Trinity! It's Carrie-Anne Moss, Trinity flavor. All the fierceness and mind, focus, commitment is there in the gestures. Untamed and wild and controlled. (Speaking to Moss in an interview)"

"[While filming, Lana] was participating more with the movement of the camera, and more interested in doing than rehearsing. It was less about prep and more about everyone's readiness to find the unexpected in the moment...[ they] barely rehearsed, if at all."

"It was one of those phone calls where even though you're at home, you stand up...(speaking about the conversation when Lana first told him about her idea for another sequel)"

"It's throwing down the Matrix gauntlet again; it's super smart, clever, entertaining, suspenseful, and funny.... Not that it needed it.. but certainly the depth of why this film got made is the sense of it being a love story between Trinity and Neo."

"We had filmmakers who you wanted to say yes to... [we had] material that you wanted to commit to, to give everything that you could to. (When asked why he agreed to return to the series after a nearly two-decade hiatus)"

"When we are uncomfortable or anything unpleasant happens, we look to take refuge in something. Usually, we turn to food, alcohol, sex, drugs, money, power, or relationships. But none of these things give us the lasting protection or satisfaction you're looking for. When you understand you can't find lasting happiness in Samsara, then the desire to find true refuge becomes strong. In Buddhism, we take refuge in the three jewels — the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The Buddha is like the doctor who understands your disease and knows how to treat it; the Dharma, his teachings, is the medicine he prescribes; and the Sangha is the spiritual community that helps you to take the medicine. To take refuge is to finally seek protection from suffering in a way that can really help you. When we think about the ultimate nature of reality and what causes us to suffer — this is the true meaning of refuge."

"Grief changes shape, but it never ends. People have a misconception that you can deal with it and say, ‘It’s gone, and I’m better.’ They’re wrong. When the people you love are gone, you’re alone."

"You know, it’s a funny thing about filmmaking, you always think you know just about everything, and you’ve done just about everything ever, and then you realize with your next project, “Holy hell, I haven’t had this challenge yet!” So, I think what I’ve learned is never to assume I know everything. Even, in all modesty, it’s been a pretty extensive, long-running career and I’m very fortunate. Like I said, never ever assume you know what you’re doing until you’ve studied everything, because everything is different and everything is new, and every day is new. You have to be on your toes and smart about it. That’s what I’ve learned over all those years"

"I remember that, as a kid. I never really understood how movies were made, until that movie, because it was such a technical accomplishment. Since then, you’ve seen more and more and more, for all different kids of films, about what goes into the process. If people enjoy the film, it can be really intriguing to see what created that film, how each one of those unique components came together, who the people are who did it and what it meant to them to do it. That’s a great thing to put out there, especially if it is a film that has different technological aspects that are unique. There’s not a lot of that that’s been done before, so I think it’s good for people to see."

"I think one of the things we may have missed in horror the last few years is how much fun those movies are to watch. They’re a good time. Horror has either been J Horror, moving upside down, girl with long hair, twisted head kind of thing, towards more let’s torture somebody and do something horrible over a long period of time and you can watch the trainwreck in real time. There are places for both kinds of movies, and there are great examples of both kinds but they’re not necessarily the most good time you can have at a theater."

"No matter how small or large the budget, I always tried to make my movies look like movies. They’re always well cut, well framed, look good and have energy. Rodney and I developed that style, and I’ve always done it since then. I’ve been very lucky that way, because that’s how I’ve been able to survive being in Canada all these years."

"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."

"So if you don't have money to offer to people, you must strike their imagination with something as nice as you can think of."

"The desire to be loved is really death when it comes to art."

"Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion."

"I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film."

"Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos."

"Technology isn’t really effective, it doesn’t really expose its true meaning, I feel, until it has been incorporated into the human body. And most of it does, in some way or another. Electronics. People wear glasses. They wear hearing aids that are really little computers. They wear pacemakers. They have their intestines modified. It’s really quite incredible what we’ve been able to do to the human body and really take it some place that evolution on its own could not take it. Technology has really taken over evolution. We’ve seized control of evolution ourselves without really quite being conscious of it. It’s no longer the environment that affects change in the human body, it’s our minds, it’s our concepts, our technology that are doing that."

"Dolphins read each other’s emotions by sonar and it’s the inside of the body, the configuration of the viscera, that lets dolphins know whether the dolphin they are meeting is tense or happy. Their emotions are much more connected with the insides of each other’s bodies. We don’t have that. It’s like denying 90% of what we are physically, not knowing it."

"Omnisexuality is the term that I use in Hysteria. There seems to be a strain of pure sexuality that can embody itself in any possible way, female, male, something else. This is the first time I’ve ever articulated this, but I think I’m most interested in that essence of sexuality that seems to be able to take many forms but has still a specific feel and tone to it that we all recognize. You can’t really define it as male or female. I’m very fascinated with the way in which maleness and femaleness is specifically physical. but not necessarily purely sexual. There is a difference amongst all those things. This takes you right back to the mind/body schism that I go crazy with all the time."

"If you’ve ever sat in a room with twins, immediately you’re forced to deal with this confusion. You’re afraid to call them by name because you’re afraid you’re going to get it wrong. At first being a twin is a source of power, you can switch, you can fool people—but then it becomes a vulnerability because people confuse you when you don’t want them to. The famous story of the twins who were both spanked when either one of them did something wrong because the parents wanted to make sure they got the right twin. So that would immediately make each twin totally responsible for the other one’s actions and therefore would make you want to control the other twin’s actions. It gets quite twisted and the confusion of identities becomes quite intense."

"I think all my movies are commercial. That's my delusion. I thought Naked Lunch was wildly entertaining, so what do I know?"

"I'm an atheist, and so I have a philosophical problem with demonology and supporting the mythology of Satan, which involves God and heaven and hell and all that stuff. I'm not just a nonbeliever, I'm an antibeliever - I think it's a destructive philosophy."

"I know that many artists feel that they are frauds - that's part of the pleasure of creativity."

"I'm always working on the same thing, the creation of an identity. It's mysterious: We think identity is genetically given, but I believe there is creative will involved with the decision of who we are going to be. All my movies are concerned with this."

"We are confused and bemused, and think that it’s a momentary delusion that will soon dissipate, leaving our lives to continue as they were."

"All stereotypes turn out to be true. This is a horrifying thing about life. All those things you fought against as a youth: you begin to realize they're stereotypes because they're true."

"Our voices, our representation of ourselves, have been in the hands of others, namely men, since the beginning of the mediums of film and television. My main character in I've Heard the Mermaids Singing videotaped a confession that is used through the film. It's her way of having control over her definition of herself."

"Rozema has established herself as an exceptional and distinctly sensual visual stylist. Her films are characterized by self-referential narration, idiosyncratic protagonists (who are often struggling artists), formal adventurousness, and the use of fairy tales, mythology, and poetry as structuring notions."

"In 2000, in honour of the 25th anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival, 10 preeminent Canadian filmmakers were asked to create short films. Staying true to her thematic preoccupation with artists, audiences and their relationship, Rozema's contribution was This Might Be Good, a six-minute wordless, experimental piece about hope — the hope of audiences, actors and filmmakers who gather around films at festivals."

"Rozema is one of Canada's most recognizable and successful film artists, famous for works in which the wilful imagination asserts itself despite bureaucracy, convention, and social expectation. As a writer and filmmaker, she is drawn to romantic figures whose artistry persists despite various obstacles, from institutionally derived notions of artistic standards to religiously supported ideas of appropriate sexualities."

"When I look back upon the choices I made in making Mansfield Park, I feel they were pretty ballsy. I just thought there has to be a reason why I was doing a period piece. I wanted to say, "Look, we are rich because of slavery. We stole people and made them into slaves. Nothing comes for free." I didn't want to do another English dance party."