Matt Besser Quotes

Sometimes you look at a movie and you can see that the actor or actress said, 'I'm taking this onboard because I'm making a ton of money, and not because it's going to be something special.'

I did a few independent films, but there is no money in them.

I would never refuse a film or do a film for a certain amount of money.

We want to let our play be the judges.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.

I think the thing about what I want to achieve for the label is it to really be a home for artists who are already developed, who already have a great sense of their artistry or their imaging, who don't really feel or want that marketing push.

Art for me...is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.

My films ought to be judged on whether they're entertaining or good as films, but not on the political view necessarily. I'm trying to be morally responsible and no more. I don't have an agenda I'm trying to push.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

You can't control life. It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only-only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

I don't know why you'd go to a comedian and say, "You know what? You have a large menu of items, but this one thing I did not like and therefore, you should be shut down. You should cease to make a living and you should be thrown out in the streets."

Good or bad, the one thing I can say about my art is, if I can quote Sinatra, I did it my way.

[on the future of hand-drawn animation] I'm actually not that worried. I wouldn't give up on it completely. Once in a while there are strange, rich people who like to invest in odd things. You're going to have people in the corners of garages making cartoons to please themselves. And I'm more interested in those people than I am in big business.

I think it's possible to be free in a big production. It's the eye of the director and the actor and the story.

Don't worry about telling your actor what to do.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Hopefully this is going to be a trend, the beginning of a movement to reclaim theater for the artist and not commerce. I think there's a level of fatigue. Artists are tired of having to create work that's then coopted by commercial demands. When you begin souping up the car, the car no longer feels like your own.

It has become harder and harder in the United States to make films unhampered by outside influences. I've always been able to steer clear of that and keep the business people out of my hair completely.

I never pigeonholed myself - the only reason you'd want to pigeonhole is to monetize your business and, as a person, I don't see the importance of doing that. My music took off above the rest of those things: You can just make a song, put it on a CD, and get it out to all these people.

I'm not an executive. I can do it, I have the mind for it, but there's a life that you have to lead, and you have to give up your creative freedom. That's what I don't want to give up.

I'm not going to wait on anybody to put out music or a visual. Everything I will do is on my own. I'm not waiting on anyone.

That's one thing that's always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it and that was it.