- What I remember myself from films, and what I love about films, is specific scenes and characters.
- If Richard Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the 'Great Art Form' would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.
- [on meeting David Blaine] The first time I hung out with him, he took me to this condemned building, and it had a pizza oven [inside], and he crawled into the pizza oven and turned the heat on to 400 degrees, or something like that, and he stayed in it for, I guess, a half hour. He came out, and except for one or two second-degree burns, he was unscathed. You meet a lot of musicians and filmmakers and actors, but it's rare to meet someone who can step inside a pizza oven and take the heat. I was intrigued by that.
- After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.
- I never cared so much about making perfect sense. I wanted to make perfect nonsense. I wanted to tell jokes, but I didn't give a fuck about the punch line.
- When I'm directing films, I mostly try to create an environment on set that mimics what's in my mind, as to the tone and feel of things. I try to create a place where you feel that anything's possible. Everyone's in character all the time to a degree, everyone's in costume all the time. You want to create an environment where these characters really exist, and then it's about me finding it. A lot of times, I'll give six or seven different scripts out with alternate endings, with different character lines, with different pieces of dialogue. A lot of times, the actors think they're working on different films.[2008]
- When I was a child the temptation to sin was always a romantic option. This romantic option lead me to the cinema, a place where sin was welcome.
- Cinema sustains life. It captures death in its progress.
- [on his unfinished film "Fight Harm" where he randomly picked fights with real people] I wanted to make the great American comedy that would just consist entirely of me getting beat up, like a condensed slapstick comedy where you slip on a banana peel. I was really just trying to give people the greatest laugh of their life.
- I never really feel wrong while making movies. I know myself and I know that my intentions are pure and I'm on the side of righteousness... I always wanted the films to play in malls, and I wanted as many people as possible to see them. I never want them to be marginalized in the kind of rarefied, elitist world. I always have hopes that the films will permeate culture in a big way. A lot of times I'm wrong, but it's always the hope.
- [on his life after directing Gummo (1997) ] I felt like Clint Eastwood except you know, from a different time and different place. I'm thinking about the Clint Eastwood with the orangutan [Every Which Way But Loose (1978)]. It's hard to say things without coming off in a certain way, but at a young age, I felt very driven. All I ever wanted to be is a soldier of cinema.
- [on his cinematic inspirations for Spring Breakers (2012)] A lot of it came from things I'd experimented with when shooting ads and trying different techniques. The movie I watched most, believe it or not, was Michael Mann's Miami Vice (2006). The reason I love his movies, and that movie in particular, is I could feel the place. When I watch that film, I don't even pay attention to what they're saying or the storyline. I love the colors, I love the texture. [2012]
- [on Mister Lonely (2007)] I basically started thinking in terms of images that really have nothing to do with anything. Just simple images. I started dreaming about flying nuns, falling out of airplanes and praying the whole way down and surviving. Then I started to fixate upon specific images and characters. One of them was the idea of a Michael Jackson impersonator walking the streets of Paris. I had these different images although they really don't have anything to do with one another. But I knew that there was something in there that I was trying to get out, a unified idea, but I wasn't sure how to say it. [2007]
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content