Justin Cartwright Quotes

My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life.

When my first film 'The Seventh Continent' was presented here 12 years ago, non-Austrian spectators would come up to me and say, 'Is Austria that terrible?', whereas for me it wasn't about Austria but about highly industrialised cultures everywhere.

I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.

All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the black and white, or the red and blue, and that's where complexity lies.

'Mission: Impossible' is fun. But for myself as an artist, I'm really more concerned with the human condition, the human experience, especially from an African American point of view.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

Fundamentally, all art is about human beings. You're always showing larger moral questions through the smaller moral, philosophical, or political choices through one character in the book.

All literature is gossip.

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

When you make an exploitation film, you always want to have a real issue. That's how they were always done.

I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.

I'm not interested in going and doing a big, action-adventure romp with nothing to say about being a human being.

Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.

Feature film can have a major role in explaining ideas and describing peoples' lives and their struggles.

My films are a reflection of the society I live in, what I see and observe.

I like the movies that embrace the complexity of the human condition.

The only serious function films can serve is to act as a record of their times.

I love Victorian novels, the way they capture the nuances of the human condition.

August [Wilson] elevates in us is the average man in a way that is heroic and real and human. What you do is you sit with our pathology, you invest in our humanity. We're not walking around like walking symbols like we mean something larger. We're just moving throughout our lives and that's the power of the piece. That's revolutionary.

Legitimately produced, and truly inspired, fiction interprets humanity, informs the understanding, and quickens the affections. It reflects ourselves, warns us against prevailing social follies, adds rich specimens to our cabinets of character, dramatizes life for the unimaginative, daguerreotypes it for the unobservant, multiplies experience for the isolated or inactive, and cheers age, retirement and invalidism with an available and harmless solace.

Personally, I like the social novel. I like writing that gets in and under the hood and looks about - at what's going on. But I don't say to any writer that that's absolutely what they should do.

The way I look at a musical, you are commenting on the human condition no matter what you do. A musical may be light and frivolous, but by its very nature, it makes some kind of social comment.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, there was such a variety and diversity of types of films that you could see. So many of them were really more about the human condition and about relationships between people, and they were smaller films that had a much greater impact on me as a human being.

Movies are only the result of where we are as human beings.

I want to make films about the human condition, what we're doing to the world or ourselves.