Karyn Kusama Quotes

What I keep searching for in movies, more and more, is the right gravity.

I love films that make me react emotionally and physically when you walk out of the cinema. Two of my favorite films however have got to be 'The Tree Of Life' and 'The Piano Teacher,' which also stars one of my favourite actresses Isabelle Huppert.

I'll say, what makes me happy about making movies is, every once in a while through movies we find a kind of honesty. There's an honesty in fiction that's as effective or even more powerful than the honesty of our lives. We can find something that's genuinely true, like a chemistry between people or a statement that speaks to an audience.

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.

Sometimes it feels as if the artist hasn't done the real work of engaging with the material. Film noir can't just play off looks and attitudes. A thriller needs a dose of genuine suspense. It does not have to be literal, but it does have to feel genuine. Otherwise the artist is just leeching off the form.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

I think a film is a failure if it doesn't have an emotional effect. That's the film's failure. Not if it doesn't deliver a message, but if it doesn't have emotional effect or visceral effect.

Cinema has the capacity to be so physiological.

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas. Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don't.

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

A film should be an experience. You should feel something. It should motivate you to feel something.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

There are lots of great movies coming out of the U.S. but it's not something I've ever really been interested in. They're great films but I much prefer the smaller independent films, which are more thought provoking and experimental.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

If the audience, in minute 50, is thinking about the way a movie is shot, there's a problem. I want it to permeate emotionally.

In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.

I tend not to be so attracted to films that force me into an intellectual place over an emotional one.

Film is built for kinetic movement and crash and burn. It's a great tool for spectacles. But if it's not rooted to something a little higher, you're just kicking your butt around the corner. You can only take so much of that. You have to have some sort of foundation to explode from.

I think when see you a character on the screen who is actually being touched by the world, and the stuff is actually landing on him, it makes you empathize.

I had such an amazing experience on 'The Pillowman' that it was hard to think what else is going to live up to that.