Jane Campion Quotes

Being a talented artist is good, it's nice, but it's not the most important thing. I think being a good storyteller, having a good idea, a good gag, is probably more important than being a great artist.

I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing.

When you're pitching movies, sometimes you know what the idea is, but you fully don't know the dimensions of it.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

Your instincts for what's dramatic are the same whether you're working on a drawing or on a script.

My art, like my acting, is a profound expression of poetic license.

I guess I have a fascination with the idea of puppeteering. I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do.

The greatest thing that you have when you're a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.

I make pictures to tell a story, to tell lies, and to amuse.

If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.

We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.

Well I don't think of myself as like a horror or science fiction filmmaker. I just think of myself as a filmmaker.

A design that I create is like my own extension. It's 'thinking made visible.'

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

I'm inspired by art - in whatever form it takes. I love when I see a painting or a photograph that captures my attention.

I don't paint, and I can't draw, but I see things, I think, quite well, and I love being able to freeze things with the camera, particularly the children. Then I discovered with the camera that you can tell a whole story with just freezing a moment in reality. I find it a very good way, a very satisfying feeling.

When it comes to the lyrics, I write about my own perception of things and use characters for that.

Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living.

In a photo, you just do a click, but in art you have to put in so much energy. This concentration of energy and attention says something that other media cannot say.

You see it in the stuff I've done at Laika: I've always tried to make movies that have an artful blend of darkness and light, intensity and warmth. That have a thinking brain and a strong beating heart at the centre of it.

As artists, our job is to communicate thoughts and tell stories.