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" 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
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" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" We had all these smiley family pictures all over the walls of my house, but I always found those pictures to be odd because we weren't smiling all the time. I don't want to paint the picture of a total dysfunctional house, but there were a lot of arguments in that house. A lot of pain. "
Derek Cianfrance
Pain
Family
Smiling
" Every moment is, in some ways, eternal. Once you put something into the world, it stays there. "
Derek Cianfrance
Some
Moment
You
" I think book adaptations, the best one to me is like 'Brokeback Mountain.' Which is a short story, 21 pages, that expands so beautifully into a movie. "
Derek Cianfrance
Book
Think
Short
" I think people need fantasy, but I think they also need to know that they're not being lied to. I think sometimes the fantasy can betray people and become more difficult for people's lives than just truth. I can't stand delusion. Delusion makes me sick. "
Derek Cianfrance
Me
Truth
People
" 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
" I feel like the job in editing is to let the movie tell you what it is. So again, it's like sculpture. You just start taking away, you add a nose here, you cut off, like, the side of the cheek over here in the crease, and you have a face. But it really reveals to you what it means to be over time, and if you have enough time. "
Derek Cianfrance
Start
Enough
You
" 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
" There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings. "
Derek Cianfrance
Character
Wife
Time
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The only time I judge an actor on set is if they're not failing; if they get it right all the time, I start to question it. I feel like it's too easy. "
Derek Cianfrance
Start
Easy
Time
" Right now, I think I have time to be three things, in no particular order: a father, a husband, and a filmmaker. That's why I don't go out - I have no space for it. I feel like one of those main things would suffer. "
Derek Cianfrance
Time
Father
Husband
" 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
" If you make a movie that's close to your heart, it will be close to other people's. "
Derek Cianfrance
People
Will
Your
" 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
" I was an audience member before I'm a filmmaker. All I've tried to do as a filmmaker was to make movies I want to see. "
Derek Cianfrance
Movies
See
Want
" I love actors that are brave, that are courageous. And courage to me is not the absence of fear, it's the presence of fear, and they go to places that really scare them, because as an audience, that's where you feel danger. "
Derek Cianfrance
Me
You
Brave
" Lars Ulrich, he was my hero growing up. I wanted to be like him. I played the drums. "
Derek Cianfrance
Him
Up
Hero
" One reason Cassavetes is a hero to me is that his movies grew with him; they reflected the stages of his life. He made movies about where he was at that time. That's what I want to do with my films. "
Derek Cianfrance
Want
Movies
Me
" There's one rule that I have on my movies, which is that anything that you want to do, you can do. But! There's a flip side to that, which is that anything I want you to do, give it a try also. "
Derek Cianfrance
Want
Side
You
" 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
" 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
" 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