Andrew Dominik Quotes

You can watch 'Dawn of the Dead' and still sleep at night. Try that with 'The Day After'.

I think violence in movies, for it to work, you have to use it smartly. People get numb very fast. If you have too much violence in the beginning, it gets to a point where you don't feel it.

I think intensity is one thing, and gore is another.

In 'Clockwork Orange,' you're there with your eyes, watching all those things, your brain goes off, ahh, exposes you to so many things, and at the end of the day, it's just like a roller coaster. Why do you jump in a roller coaster? You want a thrill.

I wanted to make the violence beautiful in order to heighten our revulsion.

I think the violence in 'The Hills Have Eyes' and 'High Tension' is much more traumatic than 'Piranha.'

I'm pretty mad at horror films for ruining my childhood.

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

I saw a great many men die afterwards, some suffering horribly, but I do not recall any death that affected me quite so much as that of this first victim in my platoon.

I intentionally shoot violence to make the audience feel real pain. I have never and I will never shoot violence as if it's some kind of action video game.

Though I've been in horror movies, I just can't watch them. The first time I watched a 'Harry Potter' movie, I had nightmares for, like, two weeks.

I remember that I felt I had to avoid all these sensational photos, the hanged woman, the man who shot himself, and so forth. I collected a great deal of material, including a number of banal, irrelevant photos, and then in the course of my work I came back to the very pictures I had actually wanted to avoid, which summed up the various stories.

When I took my clothes off in Blue Velvet, I wanted to convey the brutality of sex abuse. I wanted to look like a quartered cow hanging in a butcher shop as well as disturbingly appealing.

Let everyone see the blood,' he said. 'Don't clean it up. That's the only way people remember.'... I could see the blood inside my head. It was with me forever, whether or not I wanted to forget.

When you're dealing with killing people and things that are upsetting, that can be a delicate place to occupy yourself for a day.

Nowadays, everything is so gratuitous. The violence is suggested, and it's much more impactful than showing everything.

[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly drawn from my own childhood: violence and a loss of innocence. But keep in mind that, as a writer, I'm both the criminal and the victim. I'm not trying to get out of anything easy.

We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.

I always knew she was being funny, but when I tell my therapist that my mom played the trust game with me and let me fall on the ground, my therapist does not find that funny. She's like, "That's the reason for everything! That's why you have such a hard time with trust!" And I'm like, "I don't really have a hard time with trust. I thought it was funny."

The older I get, the more I can't stand violence and have a hard time with seeing people die in horrific ways. It gets harder and harder to watch and deal with that stuff.

There’s no way you can kill someone and get to the other side of the experience unchanged.

When you're writing something, and you're putting yourself out there, or you're performing and someone comes in and savages that, then of course it feels personal. It doesn't feel like it's just business, because there's no business - it's not like we're conducting business, this anonymous critic and I. It's just that this person is tearing me a new asshole.

What assurance do I have that your parenting isn't screwing me up?

I'm so sick of seeing guns in movies, and all this violence; and if there was going to be violence in Pines, I wanted it to actually be narrative violence. I wasn't interested in fetishizing violence in any way of making it feel cool or slow-motion violence. I wanted it to be just violence that affected the story.

Bottom line is, if someone says something about me and it upsets me, it's true.