“The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you’re still friends with the rest of your life.”
“No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it’s easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.”
“I don’t want to be nostalgic for some kind of laid-back Austin where nothing was happening.”
“As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.”
“Every day’s a hustle.”
“Are any of us self-taught? It just means I didn’t go to school for it. But you do have teachers. You have mentors.”
“I’ve always been interested in the industrialization of our food; it’s been an issue for me from an environmental and animal rights and human health perspective.”
“Everybody just wants to appreciate time as it’s passing, to be in the moment. It’s the hardest thing to do. You’re either in the unknown future that you’re working toward, or you’re in the past that becomes a little abstract.”
“I’ve always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you’re doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.”
“For a lot of us, awareness is merely realizing the extent to which we’ve been lied to all our lives. You start educating yourself. You become motivated; you follow your muse where it takes you. And you see the world in a different way. You start making decisions based on what you feel is right.”
“Before Sunrise did very well internationally. It made as much in Italy and Korea as it did here.”
“I loved ‘Goodbye to Language.’”
“My dad’s chill. He’s the guy who, you wreck the car, he says, ‘Well, nobody was hurt. It’s just some metal.’”
“Took me a long time to know I was a nobody from nowhere.”
“Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we’re all stories of our own narrative.”
“It’s just too late to ban all guns. There are 300 million. We should’ve done that after the Civil War – that’s when we should’ve taken away guns and defined what militias were. But we didn’t do it then, and we can’t now.”
“I have an uncomfortable groove, ’cause I have a lot of different kinds of stories to tell.”
“I’ve always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.”
“Everyone is encouraged to see their lives, the world through the eyes of the rich.”
“I always sensed instinctively from the earliest age that I was being lied to.”
“Yes, but Hollywood is the strangest place in that they’ll torpedo their own film to prove an emotional point.”
“I think I got really lucky with Slacker. That was a film that probably shouldn’t have been seen.”
“Something about Texas I’m not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.”
“I did The Newton Boys and during the whole process of making the film, I may have spent a week in Los Angeles.”
“It’s disappointing to see films become pure entertainment, so that it’s not an art form.”
“I worked offshore as an oil worker for a couple of years.”
“I want to make a film about a factory worker.”
“Hollywood has a way of sucking the world’s talent to it.”
“The worst thing is that you used to be able to show interesting films on campuses. Those places are all gone.”
“Well, you have to keep your faith in the fact that there are a lot of intelligent people who are actively looking for something interesting, people who have been disappointed so many times.”
“Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.”
“It’s luck that one thing works out and one doesn’t, it’s sort of happenstance.”
“I do find myself at the moment, due to the success of School of Rock, to be on people’s radar a little.”
“I’ve never been a guy who had more than a toe in Hollywood anyway, so my toe is more easily lopped off than most.”
“I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors.”
“Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size.”
“I think you get in trouble if you make experimental big studio films.”
“I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn’t know would never get financing.”
“The truth will only be told over a career.”
“We emphasize negativity and violence in the media because that’s what grabs everybody’s attention, but in the real world, it’s mostly people being very cooperative and caring and connected and kind. That’s the norm of human experience. And yet, what gets our attention is the very opposite.”
“I guess I was just always one of those guys who asked those fundamental questions: ‘Who am I? What’s this for? Why? What does this mean? Is this real?’ All these pretty basic questions. I like making movies about people who are self-conscious in that way, and are trying to feel their way through the world.”
“I admire people who can just brazenly go through the world.”
“’The Newton Boys’ was the one time I’ve made a film with really active characters who weren’t at all self-reflexive and just plowed through their lives. There’s a part of everyone that’s like that. We have a biological imperative to keep living, keep moving forward… We have no choice.”
“A lot of Luis Bunuel’s later, European films are all great.”
“Ulrik Ottinger was the most real and experimental of all the German New Wave directors. She was probably the most out-there, too. She’s a fascinating artist in that world.”
“I’m a huge Nagisa Oshima fan. He was one of the most radical Japanese directors to come up in the ’60s.”
“Trump has a lot less than he says he does.”
“I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It’s anti-American.”
“I’d like to see people get sued if they wrote a bad review of my movie. If you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”
“My plan B has always been to make a film about people who talk a lot.”
“The film culture has no room for ideas. The literary culture has some room, but not less than they should, and the academic culture has a lot, but there’s no way to communicate it in a wide way.”
“The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It’s diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics.”
“’Slacker’ is so not about navel-gazing.”
“In interviews, I never wanted to play into the myth of, ‘Yeah, I was sitting there doing nothing, and then made ‘Slacker.” No. I’d been making shorts, a Super-8 feature, and running a film society. I always try to stress to people that there’s a lot of work involved and years of preparation. But no one wants to hear that part.”
“There’s a long history of people who spent that $300,000 on their first film and weren’t quite ready, and then they never did it again ’cause they were out of synch with where they were, and they would never raise that money again.”
“I remember playing for coaches who seemed like military-type guys. It always rubbed me the wrong way.”
“If you want to just make a good movie, if you don’t enjoy every step and become a master of each little moment, then you shouldn’t be doing it.”
“The best thing for your psyche as you try to accomplish anything, really, is to just concentrate on all the little things. And not just as a means to an end, but truly enjoy them.”
“The theatrical marketplace is a challenge. What do you have to do to get someone to purchase a movie ticket to your movie? You have to do something that they’ve never seen before; you’ve got to enthrall them in a new way.”
“A certain kind of film is a big theatrical film and a certain kind of film isn’t. It doesn’t bother me so much that you can pick your format.”
“I remember when I made ‘A Scanner Darkly,’ going, ‘I hope people see it in theater – but I think it’s going to be seen in someone’s room at two in the morning.’ It’s that kind of movie. And I would have loved if it had been available on multiple formats at the moment it opened.”
“I wrote a script – a script about a guy working on the automobile assembly line; I never could get money for that. I did a pilot about minimum wage workers for HBO that didn’t get picked up; they thought it was depressing, even though it was a comedy.”
“I grew up in a little town in east Texas where it was really not on the table to question certain things like whether you should eat meat or not.”
“Some of our favorite films are obviously not written by the person who directed it. And yet a ‘Taxi Driver,’ or some Nicholas Ray movie, like ‘In a Lonely Place,’ seems so personal or obsessive or whatever.”
“When I saw ‘subUrbia’ on stage, I started having those feelings inside me. I saw it as a film, and I felt I knew the characters, or I was the characters. It really dredged up all this stuff in me that never went away.”
“There are really a lot of dark shadings to a lot of my stuff.”
“We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it’s about bending the elements of a story into existence.”
“I always say I’ll never make a film in Austin in summer, but I always end up here.”
“If you make a film about childhood, you’ve got to pick a moment – you know, ‘The 400 Blows.’”
“I was dating girls who were actresses, and that was fun, so I took a playwriting class. But that was short-lived. That was one year. Around that time, I was seeing movies that were making me think in terms of images.”
“I remember daydreaming out in the outfield: I wish I had more time. I want to read ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’”
“Every film’s different; every story is so different. But I think I’ve always been attracted to try to take something minimal and to maximize it cinematically. To find out if I can I really go all the way with one idea.”
“You’re always just trying to make your film, tell the story you’re trying to tell – best you can, you know.”
“Every stage of filmmaking’s important while you’re doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it’s how to tell the story.”
“I always had that long-term vision. Even getting going with cinema, knowing it was such a long road to be able to make films, but I always had a long term. Whenever I was starting out, I had that patience.”
“As I get older, my emotions are closer to the surface.”
“Maybe part of being a dad means that the slightest little thing will make me tear up.”
“County jail in some ways can be the most dangerous because it’s often the least regulated.”
“Every college player thinks they’re on their way. But, delusions aside, I might have toiled in the minor leagues for a bit.”
“A college athlete is going to be competitive. You don’t get to that level if you’re not.”
“One minute you’re starting left fielder, hitting home runs; the next, it’s career over. I was 20.”
“I don’t see the arts as competitive at all. It was a better angel of my nature. Sports is zero-sum: winner, loser, demonstrable.”
“I realized a long time ago that, even as a kid, it’s all about the choices you make, the things you pursue. In the end, you’re a sum of your choices.”
“Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There’s a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.”
“Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn’t bad. It’s a good lesson in human hubris.”
“You don’t really grow up until you quit playing sports.”
“Pro athletes, how they go through the world is so elevated. The bubble they’re in is one of entitlement. And that starts young. By the time they’re in college, they’ve had it a lot of their life.”
“The arts were like, there’s no opponent. It’s just yourself. I’m not saying they don’t make the arts a competition with awards and all that, but that’s outside the work itself.”
“Music and smells are the most memory-recall, nostalgia-inducing things.”
“It was always kind of sad when your favorite punk rockers, like Jello Biafra or someone, would say they hate something you like. It was, ‘Oh, I thought we were on the same page.’”
“There are really smart baseball players. It’s a thinking person’s game.”
“I try to avoid bad experiences.”
“I’ve made movies where people say it’s their favourite, but they don’t take it seriously because it just didn’t seem to break through commercially.”
“To jump from the indie ranks to play with the big dogs, there’s a gate you have to pass through.”
“I like films that just put you in someone’s world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you’d care about them.”
“Here in Central Texas, you drive west, you get the desert; you drive east, you get the woods; you’ve got water, you’ve got urban environments, you’ve got country. So you can hit a lot of notes.”
“When I did ‘Slacker,’ I didn’t own cowboy hats or boots. I was like, ‘That’s not me.’”
“I’m interested in people forging their realities.”
“I look up and go, ‘I’m living in the world I visualized a long time ago.’ From making movies, to the Film Society, to just being in a film world. It’s a life that I wanted to inhabit. I think everyone has the opportunity to do that in this world – it’s just, are you gonna work for it, and how much does it mean to you?”
“I really do remember everything. I see people I haven’t seen in 20 years, and I can talk with them about what we talked about outside the high school.”
“As a little kid, you go where your parents drag you. You have no agency, no dominion.”
“I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It’s crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.”
“I’m lucky that I get to jump around, do a big-budget comedy and then a smaller film. I don’t even make a big distinction between them.”
“No one believes this, but when I’m working, it’s the same, whether I’m working on ‘Bad News Bears,’ ‘Before Sunset,’ ‘A Scanner Darkly,’ or ‘Fast Food Nation.’ I’m the same person, trying to make it work.”
“I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.”
“Some films really do take years to get going, but I’d say that most of the films I want to do are slightly smaller projects. Some could be sketches. They’re not all oil paintings.”
“I think people forget how radical the narrative of ‘Slacker’ is. There’s no story, you know? We could go from one character to the next to the next and never return.”
“The ’70s kind of sucked.”
“I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.”
“I’m kind of an old theater guy, so I’m sort of attuned to it. Like, when I go to New York, I go to plays.”
“I always thought that I had a pretty diverse body of work, I mean, as far as subject matter. Teenage rock and roll movie; romance; ’20s Western. On paper it looks different, but then there’s similarities in the vibe of them.”
“I’m not enough of one of those public personalities who feels as though he’s been one-dimensionalized. I don’t feel that strongly enough.”
“Artists are great. They jump in.”
“I’m the kid who wanted to grow up and be Bugs Bunny. I was very, very disappointed when I realized I couldn’t grow up and be a cartoon character.”
“The natural phenomenon of the universe is so mind-blowing, but you have to know about it. You have to be curious. You’ve got to find it on your own. If you’re lucky, you do.”
“My working method has always been, ‘Work really hard and get it right the first time.’”
“I’ve done my part to ‘ruin’ Austin.”
“When you have a film that’s acclaimed, there’s a tendency to go big or get serious or something, but I had an impulse to do the opposite.”
“The human psyche creates structure. We all go through our lives like, ‘Oh! And then I moved here.’ We’re pattern-seeking, structure-producing machines.”
“I guess I don’t have a grandiose view of the world in general, and I never believe it when someone else has a grandiose moment.”
“I want cinema to be a part of my life. It’s natural for me.”
“You learn from everybody.”
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