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" If you make a movie that's close to your heart, it will be close to other people's. "
Derek Cianfrance
People
Will
Your
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" Every moment is, in some ways, eternal. Once you put something into the world, it stays there. "
Derek Cianfrance
Some
Moment
You
" When I was a kid, I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war, and the other was that my parents would get a divorce; and when I was twenty, they split up, and I just felt like I needed to confront all those things that scared me as a kid - entering young adulthood and trying to have relationships. "
Derek Cianfrance
Parents
War
Trying
" I have kids. I can't hardly watch an afternoon football game with them without having to turn off the TV during the commercials. It's too much. I don't know when violence was deemed such a cinematic thing. "
Derek Cianfrance
Know
Game
Football
" As a writer, I always peel back the layers, go to the most sensitive places uncomfortably close to the heart. "
Derek Cianfrance
Always
Places
Layers
" After 'Place Beyond the Pines,' honestly, I was sick of myself. Sick of my own ideas. I wanted to do an adaptation, but everything I'd been reading, I just didn't understand it. "
Derek Cianfrance
Myself
Place
Reading
" Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world. "
Derek Cianfrance
World
Want
See
" Seeing 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' was an extraordinary experience because it made me realise that all the biblical stories and images I'd ignored as a child had sunk in by osmosis. I saw that my childhood was deeply rooted inside me. "
Derek Cianfrance
Child
Seeing
Me
" I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone's scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that's how I write. "
Derek Cianfrance
Feel
Never
Me
" One of the bad things about being a filmmaker, about being me, is I can hardly read a book anymore because every time I read something, I have a poaching mentality, like, 'Oh, can this be a movie?' "
Derek Cianfrance
Book
I Can
Bad
" From making documentaries all these years, it doesn't feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I'm always trying to shoot as though it's really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I'm going to be following. I want to follow them. "
Derek Cianfrance
Feel
Trying
Trust
" I was a member of the VHS generation. I used to study movies as a kid because I had a VCR and could record a movie on HBO and just watch it repeatedly. "
Derek Cianfrance
Movies
Kid
Generation
" I love people that work with passion and love. When you make choices that way, there's reverberations, consequences. That's what I'm interested in, that echo, that ripple of choice. "
Derek Cianfrance
People
Passion
Love
" I'm trying to be the coach. My actors are my players. They're doing things that I'm too cowardly to do myself. "
Derek Cianfrance
Trying
Doing
Myself
" I'm not asking actors to act. I'm asking them to behave. I want to see their being, not how they can fake it. "
Derek Cianfrance
Want
Act
Asking
" When I cast someone in a movie, I have to absolutely trust who they are as a human being. Trust is the intangible of moviemaking. "
Derek Cianfrance
Trust
Someone
Human Being
" Look, pain is there in the world, and there's catharsis through that. I feel like there's... a rapture, if we can get through it, if we can confront things. "
Derek Cianfrance
Feel
Through
Like
" When people think of biblical movies, they imagine sweeping epics like 'The Ten Commandments.' But 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' is essentially a documentary about Jesus. It made me aware of how real life and personal experience can create more breathtaking, sensitive cinema than more sophisticated techniques. "
Derek Cianfrance
Experience
Think
People
" I ask all my actors to do two things: I ask them to fail for me, and I ask them to surprise me. "
Derek Cianfrance
Ask
Things
Two
" You turn on the news, there're no facts anymore. 'Here's what's happening today,' and then you cut to thirty minutes of people in little boxes, little windows, telling you their opinions on it. It seems like all the news is going on in the ticker-tape on the bottom of the news. It's all opinion, it's all editorial. "
Derek Cianfrance
Opinions
Today
People
" I don't think we ever know 100 percent of a person, even ourselves, but I think in families, you get closer to people's secrets and people's darkness - and their light, the full contrast of a person. "
Derek Cianfrance
Know
Darkness
People
" My older brother gave me a cassette tape of Mr. Bungle, and I couldn't stop listening to it. I used to drive around Colorado in a Mustang II - it was when they got away from the muscle-car Mustangs, so it was sort of old lady. I couldn't go above 45 mph in that car, but I would drive around listening to Mr. Bungle. "
Derek Cianfrance
Brother
Car
Drive
" It's like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life and just watch them swim. That's what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments. "
Derek Cianfrance
Life
Great
Beautiful
" I'm not the greatest reader. I feel like I have a bit of dyslexia or something, and that's probably why I became a filmmaker. I have the need to communicate, the need to tell stories; and the need to understand stories led me to movies. "
Derek Cianfrance
Why
Feel
Me
" As a parent myself, I can appreciate the MPAA and what they're supposed to do, but what happens with NC-17 is that the MPAA is basically taking away the rights of parents. They're basically telling me that I can't show my kids this movie if I decide they can see it. "
Derek Cianfrance
Parents
Appreciate
Me
" There's something so glorious in giving control to the world. I think that's what I'm trying to do in my films - control the world but also let it be chaotic, let there be life. "
Derek Cianfrance
World
Control
Life
" I feel similar to a lot of people. I don't feel unique. So what I'm trying to do in my films is provide something for people like me, but also a collection of scenes that instigate. "
Derek Cianfrance
Me
People
Feel
" There's something so great when you're watching a movie when you slowly get to know somebody more, because it's like a real relationship. "
Derek Cianfrance
You
Great
Relationship
" There was a time in my early 20s when I would leave a movie theater and just feel so alone and lonely afterwards. I just felt like my life was nothing like those characters up on the screen, so perfect all the time. Why didn't I talk like that? Why don't I look like that? "
Derek Cianfrance
Alone
My Life
Time
" I don't have a life, really. I take my kids to school, and I go home, and I write. Then I go pick my kids up, make them dinner, put them to bed, and write some more. "
Derek Cianfrance
School
Bed
Dinner
" When I grew up, a director was Cecil B DeMille, a guy sitting down with a megaphone speaking. He was the voice of God, the image of God. When I went to start making docs, I quickly turned the megaphone to my ear not to my mouth. It's more about funneling in the words and listening as doc filmmaker. "
Derek Cianfrance
Voice
Words
God