Avant-Garde Filmmaking Quotes

Once you got Hollywood doing these kinds of movies and having all the, how you say, the tools to do it, and also to keep on finding new ways of doing it becomes - Hollywood can be avant garde on what concerns action.

All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.

Very few people actually saw Andy's films like Chelsea Girls where he filmed seven hours, ran it on two screens, where each scene was in a different room at the Chelsea Hotel with these people he called 'Superstars" who were basically super-exhibitionists - the guy in one room high on LSD talking about masturbation, Brigid Berlin in another room playing a lesbian and shooting up people with amphetamines right through their jeans, it was all real and they were really doing it (though Brigid is now a proper lady), but you know Andy really did pre-date reality TV.

But time has caught up with it and I think vindicated it. Shampoo, too: very dark, very ambitious movie.

I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.

The filmmaker Amos Poe was a huge inspiration for me by making guerrilla-style punk films on the streets of New York and - well, it's just a lot of painters and artists and filmmakers all within that scene, and it's very, very important to me.

I would be perfectly happy doing an indie film that had some really cool creative ideas.

I think Chelsea Girls is a complete masterpiece and I think Andy's [Warhol] films are equally as good as the art. I think one day they will be considered equal. They aren't yet. They will be.

I saw the original that Gela Babluani wrote and directed called '13 Tzameti,' and that was very interesting. I believe it was a French film, and I was just intrigued by the awkwardness; the off-beatness of the film really just grasped me.

New York was the last place that my movies caught on. I didn't make underground movies in New York, and in the 1960s, they were very snobby about that, because the whole scene was here.

Everything had been done long before I started making movies. I mean, there's nothing that Godard hasn't already done. You can't do a single thing that Godard hasn't already thought of. And so you struggle to do something that is not predictable.

People gravitate occasionally to the brilliantly made art low budget films, which is maybe one out of every five hundred low budget films made.

Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.

Sometimes you make very interesting movies that aren't meant for everybody. But this is a capitalist society, so everything conspires to put value on whether it sells or not.

Independent film is taking risks in all areas. It's not just about complicated women.

The 'Neon Demon' is very much designed to be like a YouTube movie. It's designed to be chopped up. You can cut it up into seven or eight pieces and they're, like, vignettes.

We're in a very competitive industry, and sometimes the bigger Hollywood things are not so risk takey. I find myself mostly existing in this weirdo indie world, which I feel really comfortable being in. The thing that motivates me the most is to try to do something way different than the last thing that I did.

I only produce movies that have something stylistically different, so that I can learn from the experience of producing.

To me, any kind of filmmaking that's reactive is not going to be as good as something more inventive and original.

I think that in America there is a new movement of underground movies that wants to kick the ass of independent films that they think whine too much.

I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene. That was the thing about vaudeville: You didn't have to worry about the beginning and ends of these things.

I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene.

I don't know that you can do an absurdist film and just have everybody embrace it in terms of filling out cards. I just don't think it happens. So you have to prepare an audience.

You can't turn up at college in stilettos and say you're gonna be a filmmaker. In the college, they were teaching me avant-garde filmmaking, where I had to make films that were, like, an hour long about nothing. I just refused to do it.