Artistic Reinterpretation Quotes

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.

When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former.

Shakespeare has been adapted by Akira Kurosawa. 'Dangerous Liaisons' has been adapted into a Chinese movie. 'Blood Simple', the Coen brothers movie, was adapted by Zhang Yimou.

Classics are constantly being re-imagined and transformed, and the originals are none the worse for it; they endure.

Remakes are happening for a long time, and it is happening in the West, too. I don't believe anything is wrong in that.

It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.

I don't think you can ever remake a classic.

I don't think it's sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie.

Art comes from art: I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed it, and that had led on to the next one and the next.

Originality in literature is only a new coat of paint on an old house.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think it's really important to remake things. If you never remake the classics, no one would know Shakespeare.

That has been everybody's challenge, above the dancing, the singing, the lines: getting into who these characters would be in 2015. Today's Tin Man is heartfelt, but he wouldn't be soft. Today's Dorothy would be sassy.

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

I've always worked from images that already exist in our culture, and I just tweak them - I photograph my vision/interpretation of things that already exist, and I take it to the extreme. And then I make paintings or videos.

I love covers because there's just something I love about replicating someone else's music or taking rare music and introducing it to a wider or a new audience.

Music is a living art. You re-create it.

If I have done anything, it is to make ugly appealing.

I never leave the writer behind, because you rewrite the movie in post, or at least I do. I always do, and I feel like anybody who doesn't at least explore that possibility is short-changing themselves. Editing is the most fun and most exciting part of the process.

I like mash-ups, taking contemporary songs and making them old... old songs, making them new.

What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant.

I regard remaking a film as creating something again.

The so-called "remake" is simply a commercial formulation of a much deeper exchange which accounts for the way cinema is what it is.

I've always liked the idea of taking old dramatic ideas and devices and making them feel relevant or contemporary or whatever.

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.