Subversive Cinema Quotes

When I was making 'Satya', many people said that nobody would like to watch such dirty people. But, when the film worked, the same people said it was so real that they could actually smell it!

I am a huge fan of Cronenberg, all his movies.

Todd Solondz is a film maker I've always loved because of how he balances darkness, humour and surrealism in his films.

One of the things about the '70s films I love - the films 'Nightcrawler' is being compared to, like, 'Taxi Driver' - is that they never put their flawed characters into any one box.

The films of Gregg Araki may not be classified as horror, but they have been known to horrify viewers.

When 'American Pie' happened, I was so lucky to get that opportunity and I just tried to do a good job in that genre. But the films that inspired me as a kid were, like, Malcolm McDowall in 'A Clockwork Orange.' He was my hero.

You go to certain movies where everything will be right and you will be invested in the story, but a movie like 'The Room' affects you instantly, and you are left with asking questions. You're almost like a part of the movie, as its not doing what it's supposed to do, and you become one with the film, and you say what you want.

Roman Candles was shown in a church, and so was Eat Your Makeup, so was Mondo Trasho, and so was Multiple Maniacs (1970). It's hard to imagine that churches showed these movies but a few in the '60s, like St. Mark's Church, or on the Bowery, they always were left-wing.

Todd Solondz is one of my favorite directors.

I think today there are too many directors taking themselves seriously; the only one capable of saying anything really new and interesting is Luis Bunuel. He's a very great director.

I love Quentin Tarantino; I love Harmony Korine, Larry Clarke.

If you see my filmography, I have mostly done non-glamorous roles.

I really like Larry Clark's films, as weird as that is. I like Richard Kern films.

As soon as someone like me or David Lynch pops up everyone says hallelujah, how weird.

It's a lonely world, being independent, and they can come away with the idea that if Lloyd Kaufman can make movies with people getting their heads squashed, with hard-bodied lesbians, women masturbating with pickles, graphic diarrhea, and singing and dancing chicken zombies - if he can do that for 40 years and put his kids through Yale, Columbia, and Duke - if that idiot can do it, anybody can do it.

Nowadays people don't know how to handle it if all the ends aren't tied up and they're not told what to think in films. And if they're challenged, they think it's something wrong with the film.

To put it simply, I'm not interested in making comfortable films, and I don't want to crush the audience's imagination. I want them to feel like they might have missed something.

I am not ready to fit into the mould of commercial cinema.

I love the Coen brothers. They're so brilliant, and they always surprise you in one way or another. 'A Serious Man' was awesome. I like stuff like that, that kind of throws you for a loop. It takes you on a journey that is unexpected.

I don't see that many movies lately that are actually about something, that are trying to challenge something about the way that people interact.

I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.

I don't really want to do the Hollywood thing. I think you ought to try to say something with your movies.

Whenever a film doesn't follow to the letter the preset strict conventional rules of today's commercial cinema, it's considered weird.

I loved films of the '70s with those antihero protagonists who you don't know if you can get behind because their behavior is really questionable.

I saw 'A Clockwork Orange' when I was 11. When you watch 'Clockwork Orange' at 11, it either totally scares you from watching movies, or you want to become a filmmaker. I was the latter.