Catherine Hardwicke Quotes

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

You may not quite understand the cinematic tricks that go behind the making of a film, but as long as you feel it, I think that's the important thing.

I want to create films that will speak to different parts of our hearts and brains, stories told from a different angle.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.

There is this old thing that a lot of people say - that the worst experiences make the best films. I don't subscribe to it. But I've seen it happen.

For me, with me, making a film is always about humanity.

When I go for a project, I wonder what underpinning a project will have that's going to give the audience some emotional access to it.

Things develop in front of my camera, and then I will try to do the best out of it. I am close, but in most of the scenes, I am trying not to be seen. I think that's the trick. I think it starts in your heart, goes to the head, and the head puts it into the finger.

Always when you are doing films, the themes swallow you in one way or another.

When you're making a film, you become incredibly close. It's not like you're filing away papers all day. You're creating with human emotions, so you do become very connected, so it is familial and romantic.

When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.

I think that directing is the ultimate martyred task of filmmaking, that it has nobility to it. It takes three years to make a film, for the most part. I think it requires the attentiveness of a mother hen.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.

As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.

My proudest moment is when I'm part of a good film, when people are touched by it.

Filmmaking is a language where you empathise with human situations. Unless you have empathy for characters, you shouldn't be a filmmaker.

Eventually, when I got the 'Meadowland' script, I saw something in it that made me think I could make something special out of it, something that could work with my style. Emotionally, I connected to it. I thought, 'If I feel this way just imagining it, maybe we can make that happen on screen and make people feel something when they watch it.'

I know that I put a lot into 'Hereditary', and I'm proud of what it is. Beyond the fact that the film takes its time and asks for a certain amount of patience from the audience - and I hope it rewards that patience by the end - I know that I'm something of an aesthete. I care about aesthetics, and I love filmmaking.

I really want to make something that makes people think. I love that movie 'Tiny Furniture' that Lena Dunham made. I just love that movie, and I laugh at that movie a lot, but I also felt a lot too. I'm just inspired by people like that.

I don't make movies to make a point; I make movies to tell stories about people.

I want to make the movies that move people in a way they've never been moved before.

When I shoot a film, I take my camera and put it among the characters and let it show you their world, their problems, their happiness and the little things that matter to them.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.