Wes Craven Quotes

If there's one thing that I've learned from both Spike Lee and Tarantino, it's that you can wear your influences on your sleeve but at the same time invoke new energy and new flavor.

Twelve years on sets watching directors, I've taken a bit from everybody and rejected a lot.

Ultimately, with every film I'd done before, there was a reference. They have their own uniqueness, but there was always a precedent.

If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn't come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that's where the stimuli and influence comes from.

I guess that in this process of trying to incorporate or to be faithful to the films I admire so much, that's how I start to find my own voice. The admiration I have for filmmakers, this gratitude, perhaps that's my only way to become specific.

Stanley Kubrick was a big inspiration. People accuse me of never using my own material. But when did Kubrick? You look at his films and they are completely unique... completely separate entities.

Signature film-making seems rather dull to me; it's about finding something you can do something with and running with the ball.

I think about a lot of my favorite directors, and I think about their first films, and I have great admiration for the earthiness of those films.

I've done more than 100 films, which is a sizeable chunk of life in cinema, so if something can startle me, then I think we can say we're looking at something fairly new.

Originality provokes originality.

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.

I can understand when people copy people of the past and make the future their own.

All of my heroes, like Dali, are people who pioneered various forms of cinema.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I didn't really know how to make a film when I made 'Control'. I had to create my own language, just as I did when I started taking photographs. I never studied either one.

I've got research, I have my own life experience I can apply, and I have my imagination.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

From the very beginning, I've always just wanted to do something I've never done before. I'm still just trying to be on that path. It's all about working with filmmakers that you believe in.

Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also out of date. It's the opposite of originality... Experience is the opposite of being creative.

He was the first to conceive of movies as an art form. His belief was that if the traditional art form would not find room for him, then he would make an art form of his own.

I think most of the best new work is intended to have much more impact at once.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?