“There is no success you can celebrate more than the success of a brother.”
“As consumers, we are making choices,and we allow things to exist, and we celebrate the existence of things. And we can also boycott those things we don’t want to be part of.”
“You don’t want to disappoint anybody, but you know, you lose your voice by trying to please everyone.”
“Cinema is a mirror that can change the world.”
“Being at a film festival reminds me of the power of film. The power that we have in our hands. Telling specific stories about personal matters can start the debate that is needed today, and that connect you with realities that you had no idea were connected.”
“With many things in life, you’re there because there’s a cute girl around that you want to go out with, and you end up finding magic. You end up not caring about the girl but wanting to stay there because of what you found. That happened with ‘Amarcord’ to me.”
“Sadly, there are a lot of ignorant people that have access to a microphone.”
“It’s indifference and ignorance that stops people from doing the right thing.”
“We live in a classist, racist, homophobic society into which we are very assimilated, that’s all. I’m not really proud about that.”
“Every time I come to the States, I wish people would react to war like they react to tobacco, for example. Because war really kills in a second lots of people, thousands of people.”
“I hope we see more stories where the heroes are real heroes, real people that don’t need weapons or super powers to change people’s lives.”
“I was raised an orphan… My mother died when I was 2 years old.”
“You have to accept who you are in order to make someone happy and be happy.”
“If we put our differences aside, we can do great things.”
“I hate fights. I try to talk people out of fighting if I can and if they start I run away.”
“Film can be a tool for change; it can start a debate.”
“Boxing is about hunger.”
“I would pretty much like to forget the music that happened to me between the ages of eight and 11, so I’m going to say the first album I bought was the special edition of ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’”
“I didn’t go to university, and so, every time that I work, I’m looking for a teacher in a way. I’m looking for people that I can learn from and to have the chance to work with people that I admire.”
“When I was really young, I used to lie a lot. Now I get paid to do it.”
“When I was growing up in the theater there were all these amazing girls telling me about the guy who broke their heart. And I was always wishing that it was me.”
“I don’t have this feeling like, ‘Oh, I want to live in the United States and make movies and become famous just because the money is here.’ I like to make movies that tell stories that I care about.”
“I’ve got two young children, so holidays are not the same as they used to be. There are now two types: family holidays and holidays you need from that holiday.”
“Many of my favourite hotels are in London. I like the Covent Garden Hotel and I stayed at Blakes last time I was in London. I like the feeling of warmth and homeliness that you get from both of those places.”
“Many times when you’re a tourist you can just stay on the surface and not really experience the place you’re visiting, which will probably leave you disappointed. Everywhere has something interesting; it’s just about being curious enough to find it and scratch where you have to scratch and stay longer and walk further.”
“When I was a teenager, I went on an organised three-day tour of Rome. It was the worst experience ever. I promised myself that I would never travel like that again, with someone telling you what to see and what not to see.”
“All your acts affect all the people, people that you don’t even know. So we have to live with responsibility. We have to live knowing that we’re not the only ones here and you’re affecting somebody else always.”
“I think film should raise questions, not give answers. I think film should challenge people to reflect, debate and get by themselves to the answer that fits them.”
“Definitely directing is the thing I like the most because this is where everything you know can be used. It’s the most personal process ever. It’s the most demanding one, but again, rewarding.”
“In theater, you are there, you have a character, you have a play, you have a light, you have a set, you have an audience, and you’re in control, and every night is different depending on you and the relationship with the other actors. It’s as simple as that.”
“I think film is a world of directors. Theater is a world of actors.”
“I grew up watching cinema in my country that wasn’t telling stories about us, and we had to find a way to connect, and our references, our role models had nothing to do with us. And I’m so glad that it’s changing.”
“We consumers have to send a message every day of what we want and what we don’t.”
“Most people are living a life they don’t like. They go to work where they don’t want to work.”
“The first time I heard the Mars Volta, I had a feeling I was experiencing something that people must have felt when they first heard Led Zeppelin. They have the same kind of power.”
“My dad was a theater designer, and I spent a lot of time hanging around the dressing room listening to whatever the actors were listening to, which is where I heard Pink Floyd for the first time.”
“In a movie, you work three months to tell a story that happens in two hours. In a Mexican soap opera, you work one day to make a story that’s an hour and a half. So you can see the difference in the quality of the project.”
“I wasn’t a fan of boxing, I was a fan of Julio Cesar Chavez. All of Mexico stopped to watch his fights. Old, young, left, right and centre.”
“Julio Cesar Chavez is the most important sporting figure we have ever had.”
“Becoming a father is the biggest change you go through in life – at least that I’ve gone through in life.”
“I think film can change lives. Doing ‘Milk’ changed mine, for sure. When I see that someone like Harvey Milk changed his life and the lives of many others in just eight years, I feel powerful. I go out of the cinema saying, ‘Maybe there’s something I can do, too.’”
“Everywhere you look, especially on TV, someone is promising to make you rich and famous.”
“I can sing ‘Love Me Do,’ very well.”
“When I was 12, I used to be the best friend of the most beautiful girls, but just the best friend. They would always come to me to cry about a guy who broke their heart, and I would just be sitting there thinking, ‘I wish I was the guy and not the best friend.’”
“You don’t want everyone to know everything about you.”
“I don’t want to do a history lesson. I don’t think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.”
“I wish parents at the end would think a little bit about how everything we do affects the lives of our kids and defines who they’re going to be.”
“I was six when I started working in theater. I chose to be an adult before I should be.”
“My father had to play the role of mother and father.”
“I was the happiest kid ever, but I did choose to live around adults and today, now that I have a kid, I don’t know if I would let him do it.”
“I always wanted to be a futbol player, but I was never good enough.”
“Acting is therapy. It keeps you in contact with your feelings.”
“I always thought of documentaries as films through which you find your voice as a narrator.”
“When I saw ‘Incendios,’ it changed the way I looked at my life… and my family. It was very strong. I believe that theater has that power.”
“There’s a big debate in the U.S. about immigration reform. We need to reflect on who’s feeding this country today, why this community has been ignored.”
“It makes no sense that this country has 11 million workers feeding, building this country, making America what it is, and they don’t share the same rights of those who are consuming the fruit of their labor.”
“Since ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien,’ I started to spend a lot of time in the United States, and my son was born there.”
“When you make a film, it’s because it’s important to you, it means something to you.”
“Before ‘Y Tu Mama,’ I did 16 movies that only my family got to see because I invited them to the premiere.”
“In Mexico, you need to be a bulldog to make a movie because everything is set up for you to go back home and get depressed and not do the movie.”
“In Mexico, we call it ‘terco’: the guy who goes out every day, and every day they tell him no, and the next day he’s there, and the next day he’s there. That’s the kind of people who make movies in Mexico.”
“There’s a reality that the market is changing, and the stories of the Latino community need to be out because there’s a huge audience in need of films that would represent them.”
“My first son was born in Los Angeles; he’s a Mexican-American.”
“No makeup can substitute for faces that have actually been under the sun.”
“My father became completely responsible for my education and for raising me.”
“It’s tough to say where I live. There are some bills that get to the house in L.A., some to the house in Mexico, and some to the house of my father – so I never lose track of those.”
“I started to work when I was really young. For me, friendship is work, and work is friendship. Those who are next to me and that have been there for a long time are those who can work with me, play football with me, and go watch a film with me.”
“I’m a terrible dancer.”
“Everyone is different, and so I don’t want to repeat anyone else’s career. I want to do mine.”
“I’m always going to be working on my English, and I’m always going to work on my English so that I can do different characters from different nationalities.”
“I want to see movies where I can relate to the guy.”
“In film, normally what happens is that not many people work more than once. Normally, it breaks couples. It doesn’t make them.”
“As producers, we choose who to work with and what films to get involved with. There’s no rule, but it has to come from an honest place. It has to come from a necessity.”
“I always wondered why there weren’t any films about Cesar Chavez. There are movies about other civil rights leaders in this country, but why not Chavez?”
“The nice thing about my job is that it allows me to look deeper into issues and then tell stories with that information.”
“If your neighbor’s reality changes, yours will change as well.”
“Acting is about communicating, reacting, and sharing – and friendship is about all of those things, too.”
“The beauty of football is that it’s about 11, and another five, at least, are sitting outside. You cannot get competitive.”
“What we have in Mexico and Latin America is a wide diversity of voices, but in Mexico, for example, we haven’t been able to get a lot of the movies into theaters.”
“You see Mexican cinema in festivals throughout the world, and you see Mexican directors getting recognized at Cannes, at the Oscars, in Berlin, but the question is, What is the end result of that in terms of the market? That’s where it’s lacking.”
“When we started CANANA, I wasn’t married, so I guess I was married to the idea of CANANA.”
“There’s a lot of freedom to do anything you want in Mexico. It’s just that that freedom belongs to a few. It’s a huge country with a big contrast. There is this big inequality, so those like us that have the chance to do things, we know we are very lucky.”
“As an actor, you have to believe in the point of view of a director; as a director, you have to be able to express what your point of view is and invite everybody to join you on that journey. So it’s always about opening up.”
“I would say doing film is all about trust and conviction. It’s about believing in an idea.”
“The first fight I ever saw live was the first Castillo-Corrales match in Las Vegas in 2005.”
“When I was young, football and theatre were the only places I was happy. I remember school as just what happened in between the things that I liked.”
“I connect much more with theatre actors than with cinema actors – insofar as you can speak of ‘cinema actors’ in Mexico, because there isn’t a big film industry.”
“I don’t make films for myself; I make them in order to communicate with an audience.”
“Mexico is where I fell in love for the first time; it’s where my family lives… so however much I travel, I inevitably return there.”
“I don’t want to come and conquer American films or the American market. I just want to do movies that I care about, stories that I like.”
“My mother died when I was two years old; that’s why I have so many daddy issues. And that’s why my relationship with my dad is so strong.”
“For me, the relationship with my father is the most important thing that I have.”
“Directors should be paid for promising impossible things.”
“Film is a tool of change.”
“I’ve gone across that border many times. My son was born in the United States; he is also a Mexican-American with the two passports.”
“California is one of the strongest states with one of the solidest economies but, at the same time, ignores the reality of its farm workers.”
“In Mexico, this idea that fathers go away is really deeply accepted because, for so long, so many men have had to leave to work in the United States.”
“The life of Cesar Chavez is a story that must be told. He was a man who dedicated his life to accomplishing change in a community that really needed it. He helped a community that was being poorly treated by instilling confidence and providing them with dignity.”
“I definitely promise to always make films about issues that matter to me.”
“I try to always bring topics to the table that matter, topics that I think need to be discussed and reflected on.”
“I enjoy working with actors so much and having the chance to be surprised by them.”
“To me, war is so far from something I understand.”
“We should be talking about celebrating our differences, understanding that those differences make us richer and stronger.”
“I started tweeting with the first film I directed. I found it the best way to promote it and to connect to the audience, and since then, it’s been very helpful.”
“Audiences want to feel represented, want to be able to empathize with the characters and the stories they are seeing on the screen.”
“I saw ‘A New Hope’ on my Vidamax because I came a little late to the party.”
“Sometimes as a boy, you really want to feel older and mature.”
“When I was a kid, if I liked something from merchandising, I’d have to go to the toy store.”
“You exorcise the things that haunt you. That’s one good thing about any artistic discipline.”
“To me, directing movies is just that. It’s a need to question myself and set the things that disturb me on the table.”
“As an actor, you are always someone else’s tool. You can have a connection with them, and you can share their point of view, but ultimately, you are helping them reflect.”
“’Abel’ is about the father I don’t want to be and the boy I used to be.”
“I’ve always wanted to be a part of the ‘Star Wars’ world; the films were very important to me. All my older cousins were huge fans, and I wanted to belong to that community.”
“I always liked Darth Vader. I remember, when I was a kid, I went to the toy store for the Darth Vader pencil case. I took that to school for years.”
“We have to accept the world has become this place where we have to interact with people who are very different from us.”
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