Steven Soderbergh Quotes

Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.

I don't want to do a history lesson. I don't think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.

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.

I don't think you can figure this stuff out. If you could figure all this stuff out, then all the great filmmakers would come out of Yale and Harvard. It's not an intellectual process.

It could be sci-fi, love story, historical drama what counts for me is the fact that they're made by great directors with a great point of view who bring the audience to be elevated and at the same time entertained. That's what cinema is.

Cinema is a creative medium. The director has the right to express.

You can't make a film for your personal satisfaction. That is why I detest the cinema of people like Mani Kaul.

My responsibility is to make a film and find my dramatic language; I don't have any political or social responsibility.

Cinema is still a very young art form with extraordinary techniques and very impressive special effects but sometimes it seems the soul has been taken out of things.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.

For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.

I mean, '8½' to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act of filmmaking and creativity.

Agnes Varda changed my view of cinema; she directs from an artistic point of view, and a film is most of all the expression of an artistic director. I learnt to enter the world and the imagination of a director.

Godard is incredibly brilliant, the things he says. Apparently here in France, the most interesting thing when a new film of his is going to come out are his press conferences, because he's so brilliant.

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

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

Every filmmaker's just going to keep trying to make it the best you can make it: make it as potent and interesting and entertaining and exciting and tough and sexy as you can.

'Rocket Science' is really where I fell in love with filmmaking, I think 'Camp' was incredible, but it was so bizarre, and I was trying to find my footing in this world where you don't have an audience for immediate validation.

I think cinema has this beautiful component. It's a universal language.

A movie is really provocation. It's not a message, it's not a statement.

No film should be meaningless.

I get people saying, 'Opera is too large a canvas for me. I don't love it. I love movies that feel almost like documentaries,' in terms of artistic vocabularies of storytelling. I totally get that discussion; that makes sense to me.

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

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 am trying to make the kind of film that I would be happy to see.