Melina Matsoukas Quotes

I want to make movies and pieces of television and pieces of art that crack everyone's assumptions.

My style of cinema is different and I always look at my films as the audience would.

And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.

I always believe that Kar-Wai has a complete script: he just doesn't show it to us. He wants us to experience and explore the character. He gives you a lot of space, and you know every time will be a very long journey. You just live in the character, and that's very different from other directors.

Most women's pictures are as boring and as formulaic as men's pictures. In place of a car chase or a battle scene, what you get is an extreme closeup of a woman breaking down.

I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.

Before we start filming, I have a strong idea of the look and the feel that I want to create, and I'm happy to explore any means that will help me achieve that.

Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.

I've heard it said many times, 'Let's work on the look of the film,' but that doesn't work with me.

I don't approach films purely in context of genre.

I think TV is much more the writer's medium and film is about the director and their vision and how you can collaborate with them and see that through to the end. They are so different.

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

As an actress, you're part of what the director is creating, and as a model, you're representing a designer's vision.

There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, people who understand the joy of the imagination.

I'm very attracted to directors who want to experiment. The thing that attracts me the most are people who are trying find a language that is correct for their film, for that specific film.

This sounds really craven on some level, but on some level, a lot of what I'm doing is trying to not do a typical TV show.

No two directors make the same film the same way.

I don't have a style. I've never thought of myself as a stylist like the visual stylists I admire enormously - Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker - in which every shot has a great idea in them.

Hollywood looks backwards and tries to repeat. And we really try not to do that. We don't always succeed, but I really think that what we try and do is different.

The kind of filmmaker that I am, even my darker horror films generally are still very fun. And I think that's important for me and the kind of films I make.

As fantastic as it is to have 'Vogue' and 'Vanity Fair' as places to work, I don't often get to shoot the kind of things I like to photograph in the way I like to photograph.

I just want to make TV that I want to see.

The through line of the way I like to work, what makes me different, and what I like to do for every project - although they are completely different from each other - is I like to do a lot of research and create a unique landscape and unique soundscape for each movie.

Some people have iconic directors in their mind, or they want to make particular styles of films they have seen before. I think this is a waste of time and energy.

I always want everything I do to be somewhat cinematic. I don't want to be the rapper that'll just post up and shoot a video anywhere with no real meaning to it.