I want to remind people that we create films for the MMFF as gifts to them, not to see whose entry is better or which film earned more at the tills.
The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.
I thought the plays would speak for themselves. But they didn't.
Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.
Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.
I often avoid using the terms 'figuration' and 'abstraction' because I've always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting - you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.
Andy Warhol's art wasn't that interesting to me. He was more interesting to me as a person. He was art himself. I don't even think he was really into art, per se. He may have liked to do it, but I think he was more into people being into him.
Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.
My favorite music is when the sound is supplementing the message. I don't think it's dramatic; it's cinematic.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.
Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be.
Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.
I don't know how it is for people who write fiction or literature, but for me, when I'm writing music, especially with this album, I felt compelled to hold up my end of the conversation. I want people to connect deeper with it.
I really sing songs that move me. I'm not in show business. I'm in the communications business. That's what it's for me.
Art is meant to disturb.
A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don't stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do.
Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.
What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it.
I never consciously tried to conceive of what my sound should be.
In America, they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent.
It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.
Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.
There was a big drive when I was at art school to make you aware of the economy of meaning - after all, this was still during the tail end of minimalism. Being responsible for everything you put in your picture, and being able to defend it. Keeping everything clear around you so you know what is operating. To open the wound and keep it clean.
