Alan Rudolph Quotes

My plays are always pushing towards cinema anyway. They're down and dirty, real and more fun.

'Devdas' isn't a real film. It isn't in the same genre as Mira Nair's 'Monsoon Wedding,' where the camera's presence is so understated it almost disappears.

The luxury of television is that you get more than one shot at who you think the guy is that you're playing.

There are always dimensions, and the way they get expressed is through the writing and the actors and the director you get to work with on that day. But there are always dimensions, outside of really basic stuff for very young people where it needs to be very clear.

Film is the only language I speak, and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. You don't want to preach to people, but you want them to think about why things are the way they are, the history that is there as well as the possibilities.

I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world.

Film is an emotional medium; it's not a logical medium. It's not an intellectual medium, so every decision you make as a filmmaker and an actor has to be emotional in some way, even in the rejection of logic.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

There are all kinds of ways that people present their films, but that's kind of a good feeling, if you can make it seem like the characters are really there.

I think indie films are really important, because they show the studios and the audiences when they see them, great stories. Really interesting, small stories.

I think 'NH10' could have been done equally well by anybody else, and it's not a 'female-centric' or 'male-centric' film. It's the story that will appeal to the audience.

I've obviously always been aware of actor-oriented films, being an actor. Altman and Cassavetes were really strong. And then I realized their structures were quite fascinating, too.

Theatre is more metaphorical where you have to be louder and larger than life, whereas film is more subtle and more real.

For me, film is an extremely powerful way of conveying a message to a mainstream audience.

'Teachers' is in no way a realistic soap; we're not trying to do that, which is why we never do 'issues.'

Film as a medium has a power that sports like wrestling lack.

Movie, being an art form, should have artistic value and should do justice to the artistes.

A lot of cinema is about the game of authenticity - do you feel it's real?

I love when you get the feeling of some social reality with a fictional film.

I enjoy films like 'American Beauty' and want to do similar films that reflect our culture.

When I was asked to come over to the States, I thought to myself, 'What the Americans are very good at doing is creating stories with strong movement and plots that carry the movie as it goes along.'

Whatever I do, no matter it's for television, web or the big screen - it should satisfy me as an actor.

That stupid postmodern emphasis on image over content has slammed us right into a dramaturgy that willfully leaves the audience behind and then resents the fact that they don't 'get it.'

When you're writing for a game - even if you're using very well known characters like Batman and his villains who lend themselves to many different interpretations - you have to keep in mind that you're writing for a different medium. Things are a bit more straightforward than it is for a feature film or a TV show.

As a director, what I'm trying to do is to create interesting stories.