"Cinema is part truth and part spectacle. You can't forget the spectacle." - James Gray
Afterschool plays like a film student’s demo reel of the various ways to signify “alienation”—shallow depth of field, over-lit sterile interiors, ambient sounds of fluorescent light hums, expressionless actors, methodical tracking shots frequently overrunning or catching up to their human subjects....you’d think Afterschool’s 24-year-old first-time feature director Antonio Campos had just discovered them for himself by the way he embarrassingly assaults the viewers with them in order to fashion his astonishingly shallow portrait of teenage disaffection.
-Reverse Shot
This movie is the most delicate movie. I can’t imagine having a more delicate movie. It just did not work until everything worked. It was just pieces until everything was perfect, every single thing. You got the pace right, you got the music right, the sound effects. It just wouldn’t work. I literally thought we were in trouble. It went from like no movie to heaven in like ‘boom’ like that, because it was just so delicate. It wouldn’t let me do anything to it that it didn’t want.
-m night shyamalan on the village
It’s not important to me if the film is predictable or unpredictable. In fact, I almost prefer the film to be inevitable. That the unfolding of events in the film proves itself to be something that you could have predicted could happen. I think that this view of cinema enables you to get out of the way of “surprise”. If you look at Macbeth, for example, the witches basically tell you what will happen. The pleasure becomes not WHAT will happen, but WHY it happens. “What” will happen creates art that has a limited shelf life. Once you know the answer, it becomes irrelevant. If the question is why, it never ceases to be interesting. That for me, is a higher calling for any creative work.
-James Gray
‘I want to do a movie with no trailers; all the actors do their own makeup; we shoot it in the streets, without blocking off streets. I don’t want it to be a big production. I don’t want actors wandering away and sitting in their trailers for thirty minutes. I want everyone to stay on set. I want it to be like a student film, in terms of how many people would be on set.
Wes Anderson on Darjeeling
HERR DIRECTOR
"There will always be some sort of an obstacle, and the worst of all obstacles is the spirit of bureaucracy. You have to find your way to battle bureaucracy. You have to outsmart it, to outgut it, to outnumber it, to outfilm them -- that's what you have to do."
CARLO PONTI AND SOFIA
Any man who thinks he can read the mind of a woman is a man who knows nothing. - Bob Evans
WOKE UP THIS MORNING
"I said to myself, This show is about a guy who's turning 40. He's inherited a business from his dad. He's trying to bring it into the modern age. He's got all the responsibilities that go along with that. He's got an overbearing mom that he's still trying to get out from under. Although he loves his wife, he's had an affair. He's got two teenage kids, and he's dealing with the realities of what that is. He's anxious; he's depressed; he starts to see a therapist because he's searching for the meaning of his own life. I thought: The only difference between him and everybody I know is he's the Don of New Jersey."
LUCHINO VISTONI'S "LA TERRA TREMA"
"Unlike Bresson he never rejected cinema as it was; unlike Godard he never used his films to question established techniques. Rather, Visconti pushed the cinematic creative envelope simply because the limits of film narrative were not big enough to contain the scope and complexity of his vision."
03-15-27%5D.JPG)
A THING OF MYSTERY
I have always been convinced that cinema is a thing of mystery, and that you can’t express or explain this mystery through storytelling and narrative alone. I am also convinced that the world of women is dense with this same mysterious quality that the cinema has. My dream was to have these two worlds “make love”—that I think is the greatest goal for a director.
-Luca Guadagnino
FEAR AND LOATHING
"Mr. Stearns asked you to resign. In the Asian culture we do things differently. During the Samurai days we just give you a knife and ask you to commit hara-kiri,"
-Rep. Joseph Cao, R-Louisiana to Lamar McKay, Chairman of BP America
(above)Lukas Haas and Benicio Del Toro at the Mirage Hotel's 20th Anniversary
Las Vegas, Nevada
LOGIC IN THE FACE OF HYSTERIA
"Israel has a right to know whether or not arms are being smuggled in."
KARADZIC
Herzog
ASSHOLE
Because Godard meant something years ago, because he had a towering presence and a considerable influence, we continue to see his films, for smaller and smaller rewards. I believe he has contempt for the mass of moviegoers. Truffaut once described the beautiful sight of walking to the front of a cinema and seeing all those eyes uplifted to the screen, sharing the director's dream. What are Godard's dreams? We cannot know, because he chooses not to share them.
-- Ebert on Godard
HOLLYWOOD HYBRIDISM
I think that there’s so much “Hollywood hybridism.” If you go in with a script, you have to say, “This movie is like Terminator meets this movie meets this movie.” You have to compare it to something that has already made money, that has already been validated, and I don’t think that that’s the healthiest attitude in creative art forms. That talk inevitably becomes very generalized and edges out anything that could be a new voice or color. My generation is so referential, and I think that this constant comparative rhetoric really inhibits our generation from finding its own iconography. What I’m interested in, creatively, is something that doesn’t yet exist.
-Alden Ehrenreich, of Tetro
BLASPHEMY
"I went through a psychic break myself, where I felt like formalism was a dead end. You could polish stuff into oblivion and strangle the life out of a movie. I realized Dogme's a gimmick, but I don't doubt the core of its sincerity."
-Soderbergh, on formalism in cinema
ART TRAFFIK
There are even many of our most popular artists who do not in the least conceal the fact, that they have no other ambition than to satisfy this shallow audience. They are wise in their generation; for when the prince leaves a heavy dinner, the banker a fatiguing financial operation, the working man a weary day of toil, and go to the theatre: they ask for rest, distraction, and amusement, and are in no mood for renewed effort and fresh expenditure of force. This argument is so convincing, that we can only reply by saying: it would be more decorous to employ for this purpose any other thing in the wide world, but not the body and soul of Art.
-Wagner
-Wagner
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