Richard Linklater Quotes

'Pierrot le Fou' is something I keep coming back to. It's so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.

I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, 'Film Socialisme.'

Ulrik Ottinger was the most real and experimental of all the German New Wave directors. She was probably the most out-there, too. She's a fascinating artist in that world.

I would certainly say that films like Time Code and the Loss of Sexual Innocence were far more rewarding to me in terms of being able to move forward as a filmmaker.

There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there's certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.

When I discovered European filmmakers, it affected me so deeply. It redefined what cinema could be. I mean, 'Blow-Up' ends with a dead body and mimes playing tennis. What?

I'd love to do a Michel Gondry film. That would be ideal! I'd love to do an Almodovar film; you know, I think he's very, very talented. I don't care that people say he's pretentious. So what? He's a good director; he can be pretentious.

Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

I think 'Dead Poets' was probably my favorite, just to get started with the idea of doing a movie that people treated as more than a movie.

Movies would be like a broad painted canvas... or a mystical process which cannot really be explained, like, 'What is electricity?' Along with the images that go on the screen, there's a corridor of dialogue that can happen through motion pictures, whether you're aware of it or not.

I want to do experimental films.

I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.

I got exposed to art-house cinema and foreign films. I was from L.A., so it was a film culture that I didn't know about.

My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.

A movie is really provocation. It's not a message, it's not a statement.

No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.

The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative.

I can use movie as a language. Not only could it send a good message, I could let people know about my thinking and how I see the world, how I see the colour, how I see the music, how I see everything.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.

I know nothing of life except through the cinema.

I had grown up thinking of movies as something to eat popcorn with. Bergman and the other European directors were the first ones to open my eyes to film as art.

There's so many films from around the world, I emphasize, that are so beautifully photographed, but they don't get the recognition.

With 'Mask,' 'Smooth Talk' and 'Blue Velvet,' I loved the specific experiences so much. Each one was a specific filmmaker with a specific vision.

Do I wish I was Martin Scorsese? Yeah. But am I really proud of the movies I've made and really happy that I get to keep making them? Yes.