Jim Jarmusch Quotes

In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.

I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

I found it very difficult to explain to someone why you did a film. It's not like having a conversation.

When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.

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 write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

People think a director teaches acting. But in good films a director doesn't.

I would say that all my films have more content than a 'content-driven film.' It is not easy to make such films.

Get the overall. Some of my films may have been crude at times, or tough, or missed the points, but I've tried to get the overall in. I think that's more important. You may miss a thing or two, but you move faster. If you can do it in three takes, do it in three takes.

But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences - is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.

There's a team of filmmakers who follow me in the streets when I'm finding these models, to give me a sense of legitimacy to a casual stranger. This is New York City. No one's going to follow you back to your studio.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

I do get stressed at times, but I love what I do as an actor. This is the part that I don't like. I don't actually like talking about - I wish I could just go and get on with my job, because I love getting a script, breaking it down, working with other people, bonding with other people, fighting with other people, and out of those arguments, creating something that nobody expected and seeing it all come together. Telling a story, having an impact on people's lives, moving them and making them laugh.

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

Directing is all about storytelling. It's not about equipment, or anything else.

I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.

I did a film recently in the Republic of Georgia [upcoming 'Halo of Stars'] which was based on a long poem written by the director. We found that all these words were beautiful as a poem, but for humans it was more about the emotion or a look than just saying what was there.

I enjoy directing. I don't know whether it's improving or not, but it's certainly evolving in different directions.

I always say writing is like dreaming, shooting is like living, and editing is like murder, because you take all these gifts that actors give you, and you cut them.

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

Completing a piece of art and using all of the elements of making a film, was satisfying, for sure.

It's really hard to make a good film; it's really, really hard. So, the director's very important, and a character that can be described with more than one or two adjectives, maybe with contradictions. Contradictions are always good because that's truthful.

Working with the kind of talent that I've gotten to work with, like the cast of Sin City, it makes me think probably more fully dimensionally about what is going on behind their eyes. But I draw the way I draw, and ain't nothing gonna change that. Although, I draw Marv and I think, "Boy, I could throw a little Mickey [Rourke] in there."

Screenwriting you don't necessarily have to do the job of the costume designer and the prop master and the set designer. It's more just about finding the visuals and finding these characters through dialogue.

Cry Baby is just a character in this world that I'm trying to create, and the music videos are really important to me, and I've fought to obviously get all of them approved.