Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything. "

Shane Carruth

Good

Time

Life

Related Quotes:

" All I know is that as an audience member, I am less and less inclined to go to the theater. "

" There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down. "

" From a completely financial standpoint, digital is starting to crack as far as an independent filmmaker's access to getting your story out there - Amazon, iTunes, all of those. It makes the prospect of doing it yourself - not easy by any means - but possible, maybe for the first time. "

" I don't read books on how to write screenplays just because I'm stubborn. So it's all sort of made up. "

" I had a really generic upbringing, I think, when it comes to viewing movies as a kid. I didn't really know what was out there or what was being tried. I was, like, 'E.T.' and 'Indiana Jones.' Those were the only things I knew existed. "

" I believe that filmmakers have to internalize the story and subtext so well that all of the departments can start to speak to each other - that music can speak to cinematography can speak to writing and back again. "

" Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they're about, I probably wouldn't be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what's at the heart of a film. "

" I'm constantly surprised by... an orange will roll off a table, and I'll catch it before I knew it was falling. Something happens there. We could write it off and say, 'Subconsciously I knew that was happening,' but there's so many things every day - I'm amazed by how little we know. "

" I think I'll always want to write and direct. I'm interested in producing and helping other people tell stories. But I'm still in love with writing and directing. "

" I can honestly say, there was a moment when I was writing 'Upstream Color' where I fell so hard for what it was becoming that I couldn't think of anything else. I was absolutely secure in this story in the way I'm rarely secure about anything else in my life. "

" I'm interested in making something that moves quickly, that hopefully is compelling minute-by-minute but really packed densely with exploration. I'm very interested in how re-visitable we can make films. If we can get them closer to a music album, then it's not such an arduous process to revisit, and exploration can be a bit more cryptic. "

" In school, when I got into upper-level math, there would be times when I would wake up from a dream and have - not an answer, exactly, but a direction to pursue. My writing has always been like that. I wake up from dreams knowing which direction to go in. "

" Filmmaking is a thousand choices a day, and it's important to just let those choices potentially be informed by something deeper. "

" Film is a collaborative process, absolutely, but I am a control freak. "

Shane Carruth

Film

I Am

" It's interesting because I don't ever want to ask a better question than I can answer, if that makes sense. I find that frustrating as a viewer. Compelling questions, while not easy, are easier than compelling answers. "

" I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, 'Well, that's emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.' I have difficulty thinking that's the way we experience things. "

" I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You're putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It's got to be aesthetically pleasing; it's got to have subtext; it's got to convey information. "

" As a viewer, that's work I respond to - work that I know is singular in some way. If I'm being challenged by something on screen, if I don't quite know why it's happening, I want to know I can do the work of pulling it apart and that there'll be something satisfactory about it. If the architecture is sound, you can be lyrical in execution. "

" My favorite films are the ones that I walk away from and I know I saw a story. "

" I've heard stories about movies that are really maybe difficult and really dramatic and good, but they are being sold as romantic comedies. All it's going to do is just... that's hurting the work, because that just makes it impossible for anyone to see it correctly. "

" I never got into 'MacGyver,' but 'All the President's Men' and 'The Conversation' were big for me. "

" I love the concept of the romance that exists when people are broken. Like, the promise of a romance when you're at the bottom. I think that's infinitely compelling and romantic. "

" It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film. "

" Going to grocery stores is almost my favorite thing to do to calm myself down. There's something about just walking aisle after aisle making mundane choices. 'Do I want that? No, I want the one that has the low sodium.' And that feels like a good exercise to be doing when there isn't anything to be doing. It's like a kick-starter in some way. "

" I've always been anxious about 'Primer.' There's good things about it, but all I've seen for a long time is the flaws. "

" I don't typically have a social life, I don't have a family, and I will stay up all night, every night, for days on end, to solve something that I think is solvable. And it's very frustrating sometimes, because I know that I'm like that, and it's not always a positive result. "

" I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn't even need to show up. "

" Whether you are liberal or conservative, people seem to know the talking points for whatever the issue of the day is. Very rarely does it seem like these are opinions that people are coming up with themselves; it's like they watched the right cable news channel, and now they know what they are supposed to think, and they repeat that. "

" I came to filmmaking because it's my passion. I decided I can't have it distorted or marred by someone else deciding what it should be. "

" 'The Master,' it was really important to me to go see that in the theater, but that's a very rare occurrence for me. I typically enjoy things on my laptop. I'm in bed; I can be able to pause them. "