'Miracle at St. Anna.' I was challenged by Spike Lee. When he offered me the film, he looked me square in the eye and said, 'You start this film off and you end this film. I don't want a dry eye in the theatre. Can you pull that off?' He was dead serious.
I watched a lot of movies. I was deeply influenced by movies.
Why do my movies make people feel so dead inside?
'The Notebook' made me cry! It got me.
If you say one gets influenced watching a character, I think it's foolish. Cinema reflects society; society rarely reflects cinema.
There are some things you can't unsee, and there are some movies you can't get off IMDB no matter how hard you try.
I think that the cinema is a physical thing. What I'm looking for is creating a physical shock with the audience. I don't care of the meaning. I don't care of the idea. I don't want to say something. I want to make a 'shock physique.'
Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of stills through my Instamatic into my eye.
I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.
'The Godfather' changed the way gangsters acted.
The great thing about the movies ... is-you're giving people little ... tiny pieces of time ... that they never forget.
Film is a tool of change.
I'm always interested in telling stories that have a message because I really do believe that film is so powerful.
Cinema has to move people.
A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.
It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.
Sometimes film kills the room to dream.
Movies don't necessarily change culture. I don't know if we know for sure if movies change culture but we know for sure that they reflect culture.
The point is that a filmmaker is like a journalist in projecting reality in the true sense of the word. Only thing is he dramatically packages it to make more effect.
You can have a role in a movie that was originally something minor in terms of screen time, and all of a sudden we see something and go, wow, that's cool.
I'll be honest: 'Badlands' changed my life: it really did rewire my brain as to how film can operate.
I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life.
Comedy and horror are cousins; they're related. They both come from storytellers who want to specifically affect the audience and elicit specific reactions during the movie.
In some ways, I think 'Pulp Fiction' hurt cinema in a very, very minor, small way. It did a massive amount of good. But it also made it impossible to make a movie even remotely like it without someone comparing it to 'Pulp Fiction.'
I have kind of a funny relationship with movies. I don't have to see the whole movie to get an impression of it or to let it have an influence on me.
