artistic restrictions Quotes

If you want to be in Hollywood, and if you want to make big international movies, you have to be able to make movies that don't have anything to do with social status or politics. To limit yourself to just do these little small movies and call it black cinema itself is a mistake to me.

I've dropped myself into straightforward character pieces in order to explore that form and reap its values. But you are sort of restricted visually when your first requirement is to tell a fairly straightforward story.

I didn't want to live in an Islamic society because I knew I wasn't going to be a first-class citizen, and I knew I was not going to be able to keep doing what I was doing as an actress.

In the past, I worked for HAL, and when working there, I had limitations and had restrictions on what I could create. They wanted me to make the next 'Smash Bros.' and the next 'Kirby,' and that wasn't the place for me.

A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully.

The criteria for writing mythological books are different. Because the results are known, the end is known. Somebody has created that limit and you have to play within that limit.

There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.

Style is based on limitations.

Everything that was interesting was outside of Poland. Great music, art, film, hippies, Mick Jagger. It was impossible even to dream of escape. I was convinced as a teen-ager that I would have to spend the rest of my life in this trap.

It's like, 'Oh, great, drag queens can excel!' - but then the ceiling is so low. You're only allowed on the first floor; you're not allowed to go play with the big boys upstairs. Even RuPaul, who's a massive success, has been limited to where her music career can take her.

I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.

. . . I wrote a letter to Thomas Pynchon asking, Can I have your permission to try to make an [adaptation] of your book? And I had no idea that he would answer me, because he's pretty elusive. But he did send a letter back that said, Yes, you can do that - as long as the only instrument in the opera is a banjo. I thought, That's an interesting way of saying No.

Comedy has to be so much cleaner than drama. You can't layer it in the way you can a dramatic performance. Which is why it's more difficult than drama - you don't have so many tricks.

When I went to Yale, I thought it would be like in Stenford 24 hours a day. Robert Brustein, former dean of the Yale School of Drama and founder of the Yale Repertory Theater was there, and we did all this very serious - I would go so far as to say completely humorless - Eastern European drama, as well as August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen, we weren't allowed to do William Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. I was not in the right place.

If a comic is himself, there'll be things he can't do - because he has to adhere to that persona.

I got so good at writing to a budget, my brain was restricting myself. I'd write, "It's a stormy night." Then I'd cross out stormy. I'd write: "It's a calm night." Then I'd cross out night. It's noon. Because you know how much night costs. You know how much rain costs. Nothing comes free in movies.

I think architects are often at their best when faced with restraints.

The idea of making music from an imaginary culture was to give ourselves a set of restrictions and parameters within which to work. Otherwise, we might have just gone on all kinds of creative detours, some of which might have been interesting. But better we confine ourselves to something.

Do you know what's most interesting? Working with the very strong restrictions of the institution. In the Renaissance, the aristocrats would order paintings from the artist. They would order the Crucifixion of Jesus. The restrictions were amazing. Jesus had to be in the middle, three apostles on the left, four apostles on the right - and still you had masterpieces. It's really interesting to work within restriction, and see what you can do with restriction.

I coined this term 'freedom thru limitation' back in the '90s because I was sick of art being treated like pop, because of this boring 'anything can be art' theory.

The existing documentary makers still believe that it is impossible to produce drama material in this State, otherwise they would be doing it, they say.

In the Orthodox religion, you don't draw the human figure. It's against the rules.

What I liked about doing a soundtrack is that it's almost the opposite of any kind of normal recording that a band does, because it's very much a restricted, narrow... And I kind of like that, I find it exciting to work within these things.

Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.

In ballet, I felt that no matter how good I was, if I didn't have the right body type or if I didn't fit a certain mold there was nothing I could do.