Lars von Trier Quotes

Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.

we who determine how quickly time passes.

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.

Time and distance have a way of playing tricks with your best intentions.

Time narrows or expands according to how we approach it. It varies with a man’s breadth, with his heart.

Time does not always pass at the same speed. We are the ones who determine that speed.

I find myself acting for an editor more, because there's a quick turnaround with television, so you want to try and seem like you're as frenetic as possible, while replicating your movement so you're giving the editor more opportunity to cut within the different takes. If you're so crazy that you're sitting in one take and standing in another, the editor can only choose one take or the other. But if you can wrangle yourself into the same spot over and over, then you give them more choices for you.

Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.

On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled far and seen much, is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents, soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.

Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?

I think time is elastic. There are moments in my life that are many, many years ago and yet I can conjure them as though it's a second ago. And there are other things that happened maybe last week that seem like ages ago.

When you cut into the present the future leaks out.

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

As a director, when you cut scenes from a movie, you do it with the idea that it is making the story move forward and progress. Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.

It becomes pretty crystal clear once you watch that first assembly [movie cut] the things that are just grinding it to a halt, so to speak, or slowing it down, or getting in the way, yeah.

In music the present is extended.

I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.

We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.

Because time isn't something that always proceeds at the same pace. It is we who determine how quickly time passes.

I believe shooting chronologically gives you a very fresh perspective and you're always aware of where you are in the development of the characters.

All the best movies are the ones that are cut from a more middle ground.

Time is measured by the quality and not the quanity of sensations it contains.