To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight
I like being fooled. When I watch someone who does sleight-of-hand and fools me, it's a great feeling.
What tricks the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.
In this world we live in now, with a 24/7 news cycle, perception can sometimes be more powerful than reality.
I kinda like messing with perception a little bit. Kind of what drugs do sometimes, and drinking. I mean, you know, you mess with your mind a little bit to see life from different angles. Within reason, if you can handle it.
This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.
If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.
I don't want to fool people. If I wanted to do that, I would be working with virtual reality. I want to operate on the other level, the other end of the illusion spectrum. I want to create the worst possible illusions so it doesn't really fool people, but instead give people a measure of their own belief. It makes them aware of how much they need to be fooled in order to understand the world around them.
The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people.
