- There are too many people in the film industry with the morals of an amoeba.
- Some things are not for sale, such as creative freedom and intellectual property. The way you cannot sell a baby.
- The real issue [on Ravenous (1999)] was that I would not accept her [studio head Laura Ziskin] meddling in the directing process, even if it meant that I was not to complete the picture. You cannot just direct vicariously through someone else. If you want to do it, stand behind the camera, do not hide in an office.
- Mainstream narrative cinema is all about expectations, and really low expectations, to that. We have become used to expecting very little from the films we see, not only in terms of stories, but more importantly and less obviously in terms of the mood, the feeling we get from a film. I think we know what kind of a mood and what kind of a feeling we're going to get from a film before we go see the film. It's from the poster, from the title, the stars, and it's become essential in our decision-making and judging processes. I believe it's really selling ourselves way too short. I like films that surprise me. I like films that surprise me especially after they've started. I like a film that goes one place and then takes you for a loop, then takes you somewhere else, and keeps taking you to other places both emotionally and story-wise... keeps changing the mood, shifts in the process, becomes fearless... All of this needs to be unified by an artistic vision, making it a spirited collage, not a pastiche. A Robert Rauschenberg.
- I am interested in Cubist storytelling - when the artist fractures the story and puts it back together in a more complex (and, thus, more interesting) way. More importantly, when the artist keeps shifting the emotional tone of the film, bringing a narrative film closer to the experiences of modern art.
- I don't think the artist has a dialogue with the audience or with the film critics or historians - he or she has a dialogue only with the work of art itself. The audience can always be bribed, something well illustrated by the success of the formulaic blockbusters. The critic or the historian can be bribed too, as illustrated by the art-house genre or the Sundance genre or the film-from-an-exotic-country-at-a-major-festival genre. In other words, working within the expectations of the viewers is a way of bribing them.
- Love the old description of the relationship between the artist and the art critic as similar to the relationship between the donkey and the zoologist.
- At one point, I would send a script to producers and they would send them back unopened, saying "We cannot read them because you do not have an agent." And then a few months after that, I was in receptions for the President of Italy and Robert Redford was giving me script notes. At one point, I was at Mick Jagger's birthday party, I was introduced to him and he said "Oh, Before the Rain (1994), yeah!" and turns to his producer, Don Was, and starts telling him the story of "Before the Rain". I thought, "Here I am listening to Mick Jagger describing my film to his producer, it's probably time to retire."
- Some of the people and institutions tasked with fostering film as art (film funds, festivals, critics) end up promoting activism in film instead.
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