May 2011
1 post
“Kafka distinguishes two series of technical inventions: those that tend to...”
– Gilles Deleuze
March 2011
1 post
“It is a difficult balance one has to keep between the creation of situations to...”
– Antoine D’Agata
December 2010
2 posts
“In fashion, the more a model acts like a model, the less successful the pictures...”
– Philip-Lorca diCorcia
“Whether they are photographs involving a great deal of preconception or not, I...”
– Philip-Lorca diCorcia
November 2010
1 post
October 2010
1 post
“I don’t invent characters. I invite strangers. Out of my subconscious....”
– GreatDismal aka William Gibson
January 2010
1 post
“For me, the promise of independent film is the ability to experiment. Because...”
– Darren Aronofsky
March 2009
1 post
“I’m interested in commerce. The excuse for bigness is that songs demand to...”
– Bono
February 2008
1 post
Edward Albee
The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find is at the moment of critical heat—of self-critical heat when I’m actually writing. In the two or three or four months that it takes me to write a play, I find that the reality of the play is a great deal more alive for me than what passes for reality. I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in...
January 2008
2 posts
“I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of...”
– J.G. Ballard
Slipstream
A slipstream world, or story, cannot be figured out. Moreover, this is not due to any incapacity on the part of the protagonist but because (it seems) we have forgotten how to do the figuring out. –– Graham Sleight
December 2007
10 posts
“I rather shun this getting cleared out and, with my nature, could hardly expect...”
– Rilke (on psychoanalysis)
“I believe that as soon as an artist has found the living center of his activity,...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
“As I began work on Mirror, I found myself reflecting more and more that if you...”
– Tarkovski
“Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to...”
– Leo Tolstoy
“I believe that fiction can serve to reveal not the visible but the invisible,...”
– Olivier Assayas
“The reality of all culture, our own included, consists in realizing these images...”
– Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
“I’ve about had it—the agencies, the winking, the networks, the ratings. Anyone...”
– Robert Altman
Writing As Pathology
I think there are definitely pathological aspects to it. Otherwise what would make someone sit in a basement and type for the majority of their waking hours? It’s a very weird thing to do. It doesn’t feed you or offer sexual gratification. It doesn’t do any of those things. It’s a cultural activity, in the sense of Brian Eno’s definition of culture, which is all those...
Time To Buy Your Soul Back
Then why do it, you may ask? Why take the money if what goes into obtaining it leaves you so creatively and emotionally devastated? What could it buy you that could possibly be worth it? What it buys you is this, and it is something more precious than material goods: it buys you time. Time to write rather than punch a clock at a job you hate that devours all your energy and your will. Time to...
There Are No Messages
For me, if a film is working, it’s a complex, organic creature with a life of its own, and it’s not anything like a message. It’s a much more complex animal than that. It’s not a letter. It’s not an agenda. It’s not a proposal. It’s a philosophical endeavor. It’s a philosophical exploration. For me a film is a way I conduct my philosophical investigations. It’s how I delve into my own responses to...
November 2007
19 posts
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge...”
– Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
Jacques Attali
The dominant culture of tomorrow will therefore be a carnival wherein participants entertain themselves by pretending to be someone else, by escaping the self and inhabiting, if only for an instant, the self of another. The future of cultures thus depends on the capacity to stimulate dialogue among artists, to give them the means to feast on other cultures, to propose versions of the beautiful and...
“It is important to write quickly because creativity comes from the unconscious...”
– William Matrosimone
“I like American films best, I think they’re so great, they’re so...”
– Andy Warhol
“I do want to say things in these films. I want audiences to come out with shards...”
– Terry Gilliam
“I don’t write music, I invent it.”
– Stravinsky
“Anybody can write a short story - a bad one, I mean - who has industry and paper...”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to...”
– Cormac McCarthy
“Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.”
– Josh Billings
“Imagination is the vehicle of sensibility! Transported by (effective)...”
– Yves Klein
Paul Greengrass
When I was young we were always told to be ‘back & tight’ because that way you observe but you’re not a participant in terms of you and your camera. But as I started to evolve that didn’t feel quite right. What I wanted in the end was to be kinetic, I wanted to be on the shoulder of the action. I realized that I had to have a camera that was the me of it, that was...
“As an artist, your responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you talk...”
– David Cronenberg
“It is very important to make a fool of yourself in the beginning. It’s always...”
– Lars Von Trier
It's All About Love
“We have tried to recreate the New York of the old Hitchcock films. We decided to go back in time in order to make a statement about the future. We deliberately left out flying automobiles, blue milk, weird cigarettes and implanted telephones. We are not interested in technological progress. We decided to go backwards partly to direct audience attention to what it’s really all about: love and the...
Dogme 95
There are two essentially different things you can do with a camera: framing and pointing. You can strive for perfectionism in carefully planned and controlled shots unfolding within the precisely calculated frame of the camera. Or you can go out into the here and now and see what happens when you impulsively point the camera at an event that seems exciting and relevant. The framing method, with its complete control, fosters formalism, while the pointing method, with its loss of control, fosters realism – the polished versus the raw.
–Peter Schepelern
“In advertising you’re taught perfectionism; prior to Dogme I’d never have...”
– Jesper Jargil
NATURAL STORIES
“Natural stories are the foundation of any dramatic narrative. This is such an obvious fact that you almost lose sight of it. In fact, a lot of writers lose their way on this point. We think we have to make something special, something original. And we do. But what is original is just a small change in the deeply familiar. And what is deeply familiar? All that is deeply familiar to us is a series of stories, not archetypical stories, but stories we are involved in every day, stories whose mechanics we understand completely. It is a prerequisite for creating something surprising or interesting that the foundation for it is something we know the mechanics of. These are the stories that interest me.”
– Mogens Rukov
“My greatest virtue as a director is my stubbornness.”
– Lars Von Trier
WORKING CREDO
Rules provide an important working principle for me. I invent rules. A new set for each film– most often with the purpose of delimitating my technical possibilities. What the camera is allowed to do, and what it is not. What the editing can do, and what it cannot. This restrictive discipline is of crucial importance to my work. It is like making mental optics with which things and events in life may be viewed in a particular way. It is a way to create order out of chaos. It is a frame, a Golden Section that focuses and elaborates segments within brief instants of time.
–Jørgen Leth
October 2007
2 posts
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In...”
– Henri Bergson as quoted in Kafka on the Shore
“It seems to me that for an individual in the modern world with no social unit...”
– Joseph Campbell, The Way of Art
September 2007
1 post
“The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it...”
– Jean Giraudoux
August 2007
1 post
“I don’t believe that didactic writing can be really good. If I’m...”
– William Gibson
June 2007
1 post
“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
May 2007
1 post
April 2007
6 posts
How To Be Creative
1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to change the world.
3. Put the hours in.
4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job....
“It’s been my experience that folks with no vices have very few virtues.”
– Abraham Lincoln
H.P. Lovecraft: Notes On Writing Weird Fiction
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they...
“Life is not a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
– Stephen King