Derek Cianfrance Quotes

The men and women who are truly filled with light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.

Everybody has a lot of darkness in them because without that you're not a whole person.

Although my stories are all very different on the surface, I like to write stories about characters struggling with big problems. I'm always reminded, no matter how different from me one of my characters is from me on the surface, how we're all pretty much the same underneath.

The human longings that are deep inside of us never go away. They exist across cultures; they exist throughout life. When people were first made, our deepest longing was to know and be known. And after the Fall, when we all got weird, it's still our deepest longing - but it's now also our deepest fear.

I'm a human being and I fall in love and sometimes I don't have control of every situation.

I actually think it's harder to play vulnerability, because you're having to delve deeper into portions of your own psyche, what it is that makes you human.

We're all complex human beings, and if some of that complexity shows through, I think it's advantageous for the movie.

No one ever saw all of him. It took me nearly four decades to allow my father his shadows, his reserve, to sit silently with him and not clamor for something more.

I talk a lot about strength, faith and love, but I don't ever talk about the fact that I am one of the most sensitive people in my family. That might be the most shocking, because you always see me fighting the good fight, with the strong face on, but I am the most emotional.

I also have a different, softer side, and I want for people to hear that.

Seriously, women have a level of outward compassion that a lot of men don't necessarily have. Guys feel as deeply as women, but they don't share it as much. Learning how to do that more has been a valuable add.

I wouldn't mind having my heart broken because it would mean that I had that much feeling connected to somebody. And that would be really great.

I've discovered new parts of my manhood, places I couldn't get to without loving someone else unconditionally and putting others before myself.

I like exploring both the light parts and the dark parts of a single person. And all of those shades tend to come out most acutely in stories about families.

A lot of women don't know how to love because there's deep reasons for them not knowing how to love. And what I mean by deep reasons is deep and dark reasons.

My relationship with my grandmother has gone from strength to strength. As a shy, younger man it could be harder to talk about weighty matters. It was: 'This is my grandmother who is the Queen, and these are serious historical subjects.'

I think people have a lot of layers. I know I do in particular.

I'm really not interested in acting as a facade, I'm interested in it as an emotional expression and as a transcendent experience for an individual. I find that a lot of people, a lot of young actors, haven't gotten to the point where they're comfortable being stripped down. They're still interested in ornate jackets.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

I love how complicated we are. We are complicated because of what we've had and lived.

And maybe it is only by finding yourself that you can feel the true intensity of becoming close to another person.

That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.

I do write songs about love but I don't really know love that well.

Anything an artist does is to show ourselves as we really are, which is a complex thing. I don't think that one work of Philosophy or Art, or Letters, or Acting, or Middle Playing, or Tightrope Walking, or Flea Circuses has made mankind better, if by better you mean kinder, wiser, more tolerant of each other. One thing self knowledge. Knoticayton: know thyself.

Until we have seen someone's darkness, we don't really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone's darkness, we don't really know what love is.