The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things . . . the trivial pleasure like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.
The ridiculous events in everyday life are often overlooked - people don't recognise it as potentially cinematic.
The significant, life-forming times are the dull, in-between times.
It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us.
Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts.But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying.
Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory.
Life is not all high emotion. Some of the most interesting things are when its not highly emotional: little details of relationships and body language.
When I am listening to Vivaldi or Japanese music or making spaghetti at 3 in the morning and realize that I don't have the proper sauce for it, fame is of no use.
We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments.
There's always something exciting about small change.
As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them --"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.
Our lives are largely made up of a series of mundane moments, but those little moments are often the finesse that shapes our entire existence; it's not necessarily the big, dramatic events, although they do, too, of course.
So many things go on in life that never find their way into the movies because so much of it is unappealing. But that's what I want to show.
I'm drawn to scenes in movies where you just see characters turning off lights in a room or putting the groceries away; it's like, 'I understand that.' We all have to get ready for bed, and we all do it in a different way, and yet it's all strangely familiar and strangely human.
I realized, "Gee, you're making the same film over and over here." I just kept making them for my own amusement, but also with this thought in my head that I could collect enough songs to make an album out of it. I am attracted to non-dramatic moments in life. The idea of a coffee break is not something you'd think of as being an important part of your day, so these shorts were like little free zones in which we could just play around.
We all lead more pedestrian lives than we think we do. The boiling of an egg is sometimes more important than the boiling of a love affair in the end.
