Zitat des Tages von Derek Cianfrance:
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.
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.
Now, I love movies so much, but I find a lot of movies to be arrogant in the way they're kind of know-it-alls - they have perfect characters on the screen that know everything about themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I grew up Catholic, so I feel guilty about everything.
Lars Ulrich, he was my hero growing up. I wanted to be like him. I played the drums.
Every moment is, in some ways, eternal. Once you put something into the world, it stays there.
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.
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.
I've always thought that guns are a cowardly tool in the hands of men and women trying to solve problems with each other. And cowardly in the hands of filmmakers. It's taken so lightly in films.
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.
I'm trying to be the coach. My actors are my players. They're doing things that I'm too cowardly to do myself.
When I cast great actors, I try to make extraordinary people ordinary, dealing with these extremely small intimate details of interpersonal relationships against an epic backdrop.
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.
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.
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.
With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.
To me, discomfort is a gift in the films that I'm making.
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.
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.