Sam Taylor-Johnson Quotes

I think, if you can, it's OK to put something in a movie because it makes you feel good.

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.

Korean cinema is very improvisational, and there is a unique power that stems from this.

In a film, you have to externalize things that are internal and of course it becomes a debate about to what extent you do that.

I think a lot of making art is listening to yourself.

I think that creative work, music in particular, is a conveyor of inner emotional life. I don't feel one way all the time, so I don't want my music to feel the same way all the time.

In movies, people seem to be more emotional than they would ever be if that situation was actually happening to them.

My heart is in independent film-making. For me, it's where the fun, gritty storytelling is being told.

I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene.

All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script, and it's very linear. There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script, and then you cut that, and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.

In film, you get the license to try and go for emotions that you normally try to keep away from you.

Almost anything can be justified as a style of filmmaking if it works.

Independent filmmaking burns off a lot of storytelling fat.

If you look at the character of Sadness, they really nailed my eyebrows.

The technology we have available is not being used, and we don't have to tell stories in a line anymore. We can tell them in the shape of a tree. I can't stand to see it not happen, and I'm going to make it happen.

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.

I don't start a song with an idea of what ingredients are going to go into a song. It's not like a recipe. I will normally either talk from personal experience or I'll make a character and then try to allow that character to behave the way he or she naturally would.

I'm not that interested in recreating reality. I'm interested in recreating an emotional truth.

A short film is not a shortened feature film. It has a soul of its own.

For me, collages manage to - it satisfies all of my madness, like I'm able to make these obsessive things, but then I'm also able to make these very strong statements. I don't know what they mean to other people, but in my mind, they have a very strong particular resonance; there's sort of a power.

Though finally overwhelmed by a preening lassitude, 'Hotel' is never less than fascinating, breaking into multiscreen scenarios like Mr. Figgis's 2000 experiment, 'Timecode.'

Increasingly, the work I'm doing is in service to an idea rather than just to see what something looks like photographed. I'm trying to explore how I feel about something through photography.