Film Society Quotes

I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.

The little town I was brought up in, I'd go to the film society to these very extreme sorts of films that you wouldn't normally see in the movie houses. But I never dreamed that I would get into the position to be shooting movies equivalent to the ones I loved as a kid.

Our film society back home is so different from here. Making a movie is universal. Directing a movie is universal; it's a universal language. It's just figuring things out and understanding the codes and how the system of Hollywood compares to that of Norway. We don't even have agents. There's no studio system, no managers.

I studied English Literature. I wasn’t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

I look up and go, 'I'm living in the world I visualized a long time ago.' From making movies, to the Film Society, to just being in a film world. It's a life that I wanted to inhabit. I think everyone has the opportunity to do that in this world - it's just, are you gonna work for it, and how much does it mean to you?

I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.

It seemed like a wonderful honor to have the Film Society of Lincoln Center screen 'The Films of Raquel Welch.' It shows a lot of a variety in what they've chosen; it kind of runs the gamut of my film career.

In interviews, I never wanted to play into the myth of, 'Yeah, I was sitting there doing nothing, and then made 'Slacker.'' No. I'd been making shorts, a Super-8 feature, and running a film society. I always try to stress to people that there's a lot of work involved and years of preparation. But no one wants to hear that part.