Film Producers From The United States

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"I just tend to admire people who go for what they believe in, like David Lynch for example, and just say what goes through their heads, and are not afraid of people not accepting them. I have no respect for people who deliberately try to be weird to attract attention, but if that's who you honestly are, you shouldn't try to "normalize yourself". It's a fine line."

"Most people have strange thoughts, but they rationalize them. David doesn't translate his images logically, so they remain raw, emotional. Whenever I ask him where his ideas come from, he says it's like fishing. He never knows what he's going to catch."

"Luckily, David is able to vent everything through his art ... because otherwise somebody might be dead."

"One day he was showing me a painting he made. It was thick with oil, and right as he showed it to me a moth flew into the painting and got stuck — it flew around and its wings created a little circle in his painting, sort of like the death of a moth ... I thought David would pull the moth out and repaint it, but he fell in love with it the way it was."

"It was curious, so much was in his mind, but he didn't talk about what he was doing, so it was difficult sometimes to follow. He's quite a macabre person. He said to me one day: "You should take the kids to the London Hospital and look at all the freaks in the bottles, the two-headed babies." The actual Elephant Man was in there. He said: "You'll really enjoy it. Take some sandwiches and make a day of it.""

"Jimmy Stewart from Mars."

"It's great when somebody breaks rules and says, "You know what? There doesn't have to be an answer to this. You don't have to have a fourth wall, you don't have to have any boundaries.""

"You feel David in his movies — its another universe he takes you to — its an alternate reality but its close enough to our own that its scary."

"Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. And meditate. It's very important to experience that Self, that pure consciousness. It's really helped me. I think it would help any filmmaker. So start diving within, enlivening that bliss consciousness. Grow in happiness and intuition. Experience the joy of doing. And you'll glow in this peaceful way. Your friends will be very, very happy with you. Everyone will want to sit next to you. And people will give you money!"

"People have asked me why — if meditation is so great and gives you so much bliss — are my films so dark, and there's so much violence? There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world right now, and most films reflect the world in which we live. They're stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They're going to have highs and lows, and good and bad. I fall in love with certain ideas. And I am where I am. Now, if I told you I was enlightened, and this is enlightened filmmaking, that would be another story. But I'm just a guy from Missoula, Montana, doing my thing, going down the road like everybody else. We all reflect the world we live in. Even if you make a period film, it will reflect your times. You can see the way period films differ, depending on when they were made. It's a sensibility — how they talk, certain themes — and those things change as the world changes. And so, even though I'm from Missoula, Montana, which is not the surrealistic capital of the world, you could be anywhere and see a kind of strangeness in how the world is these days, or have a certain way of looking at things."

"On Blue Velvet, I worked with a casting director, Johanna Ray. And we had all brought up Dennis Hopper. But everybody said, 'No, no; you can't work with Dennis. He's really in bad shape, and you'll have nothing but trouble.' So we continued looking for people. But one day, Dennis' agent called and said that Dennis was clean and sober and had already done another picture, and I could talk to that director to verify it. Then Dennis called and said, 'I have to play Frank, because I am Frank.' That thrilled me, and scared me."

"Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is. Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn't know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn't know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent. I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was."

"An idea is a thought. It's a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. In a comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. It happens in an instant, just as in life. It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. That first fragment is like the Rosetta stone. It's the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It's a hopeful puzzle piece. In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song — Bobby Vinton's version of "Blue Velvet". The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it. You fall in love with the first idea, that little tiny piece. And once you've got it, the rest will come in time."

"I like the saying "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same — the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds — every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with. So you don’t know how it's going to hit people. But if you thought about how it's going to hit people, or if it's going to hurt someone, or if it's going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films. You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what's going to happen."

"I'm not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you've got time and sequences. You've got dialogue. You've got music. You've got sound effects. You have so many tools. And so you can express a feeling and a thought that can't be conveyed any other way. It's a magical medium. For me, it's so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. It's not just words or music — it's a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn't exist before. It's telling stories. It's devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film."

"I started out just as a regular person, growing up in the Northwest. My father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, studying trees. So I was in the woods a lot. And the woods for a child are magical. I lived in what people call small towns. My world was what would be considered about a city block, maybe two blocks. Everything occurred in that space. All the dreaming, all my friends existed in that small world. But to me it seemed so huge and magical. There was plenty of time available to dream and be with friends. I liked to paint and I liked to draw. And I often thought, wrongly, that when you got to be an adult, you stopped painting and drawing and did something more serious."

"I would say, we can't allow ourselves to be frightened into not living our lives, and I think that we have to keep going and we have to keep going with the faith that thing will get better … And things will get better when we make them better."

"The first eighteen years of life profoundly impact your entire life. In the book What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., Oprah shares her story of childhood trauma and how those experiences shaped her. Her mother beat her for even the slightest offense, and this abuse turned her into a people-pleaser. It took years for her to realize that her behavior as an adult was rooted in her experiences as a child."

"I am grateful for the contribution Oprah Winfrey has made to our country in regard to reading."

"You have to admire Oprah Winfrey. She is the most powerful woman in the country and comes from a very humble background. The woman has succeeded on talent and energy."

"We had a few high-profile moments of our own, including a series of rallies with Oprah Winfrey, who'd become a friend and supporter, and was as wise, funny, and gracious on the trail as she was in person"

"She's — her great strength, if anybody watches the show — and I think everybody does in Iowa; it's the number one show in Iowa — she's instructive. She's empowering. Every time you watch an Oprah broadcast, at the end of it, you know more than you started and you feel stronger. That's her strength."

"Most great instigators of social change have intimate personal knowledge of trauma. Oprah Winfrey comes to mind, as do Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel. Read the life history of any visionary, and you will find insights and passions that came from having dealt with devastation."

"So far, I don't see anything negative on this woman. I think she's a real icon. She's much more complex and complicated than just a talk show host. Maya Angelou has said she sees her as a true missionary. Everybody has a different take on Oprah."

"Oprah is different. Oprah has an army out there that really listens. She's one of the great marketing machines in history."

"She actually is somebody who has the ability to move mountains and change minds."

"We are Americans. Let us choose loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to any individual, because that’s the best of America. And let us choose optimism over cynicism, because that’s the best of America. And let us choose inclusion over retribution. Let us choose common sense over nonsense, because that’s the best of America. And let us choose the sweet promise of tomorrow over the bitter return to yesterday. We won’t go back. We won’t be sent back, pushed back, bullied back, kicked back. We’re not going back. So, let us choose. Let us choose truth, let us choose honor, and let us choose joy! Because that’s the best of America. But more than anything else, let us choose freedom. Why? Because that’s the best of America. We’re all Americans, and together, let’s all choose Kamala Harris!"

"This election isn’t about "us and them". It’s about you and me and what we want our futures to look like. There are choices to be made when we cast our ballot. Now, there’s a certain candidate that says, if we just go to the polls this one time, then we’ll never have to do it again. Well, you know what? You’re looking at a registered independent who’s proud to vote again and again and again. Because I’m an American, and that’s what Americans do. Voting is the best of America. And I have always, since I was eligible to vote, I’ve always voted my values. And that is what is needed in this election, now more than ever. So I’m calling on all you independents and all you undecideds. You know this is true. You know I’m telling you the truth: that values and character matter most of all, in leadership and in life. And more than anything — you know this is true — that decency and respect are on the ballot in 2024. And just plain common sense."

"And despite what some would have you think, we are not so different from our neighbors. When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion. We don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just try to do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too. ’cause we are a country of people who work hard for the money. We wish our brothers and sisters well, and we pray for peace. We know all the old tricks and tropes that are designed to distract us from what actually matters, but we are beyond ridiculous tweets and lies and foolery. These are complicated times, people, and they require adult conversation. And I welcome those conversations because civilized debate is vital to democracy, and it is the best of America."

"America is an ongoing project. It requires commitment, it requires being open to the hard work and the heart work of democracy. And every now and then, it requires standing up to life’s bullies. I know this. I’ve lived in Mississippi, in Tennessee, in Wisconsin, Maryland, Indiana, Florida, Hawaii, Colorado, California, and sweet home Chicago, Illinois. I have actually traveled this country from the redwood forest — love those redwoods — to the Gulf Stream waters. I’ve seen racism and sexism and income inequality and division. I’ve not only seen it; at times, I’ve been on the receiving end of it. But more often than not, what I’ve witnessed and experienced are human beings, both conservative and liberal, who may not agree with each other, but who would still help you in a heartbeat if you were in trouble. These are the people who make me proud to say that I am an American. They are the best of America."

"I am so honored to have been asked to speak on tonight’s theme about what matters most to me, to you, and all of us Americans: freedom. There are people who want you to see our country as a nation of "us against them". People who want to scare you, who want to rule you. People who’d have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe, that there’s a right way to worship and a wrong way to love. People who seek first to divide and then to conquer. But here’s the thing: when we stand together, it is impossible to conquer us."

"[At the beginning of the midterm campaigns,] I said it was up to the citizens of Pennsylvania, but I will tell you all this — if I lived in Pennsylvania, I would've already cast my vote for John Fetterman, for many reasons"

"[Attributed to a friend's Buddhist teacher] Be yourself–but be all of you."

"[Winfrey attributes this aphorism to Jeff Weiner, founder of Linkedin] Failure is what’s going to humble you."