Quotes

From Michel Gondry’s Commentary Track For Being John Malkovich

“What the fuck? I didn’t do this movie! I’ve been tricked… I don’t know who this actor is, I bet he’s not alive anymore. It’s kinda gross to watch movies, everyone is dead… I remember watching the movie and thinking the shoes of the guy survived the guy, the guy was dead, but maybe his shoes were somewhere still functioning. Anyway, I’m supposed to be talking about this movie… who is this actor?  … Jealousy is a very ugly feeling, and I hate to have this feeling, so the best way to get rid of it is to say to everyone, and this is retarded because everyone thinks I’m a bitter person, which I don’t think I am. Oh, here he’s finding the portal.”
~ From Michel Gondry’s Commentary Track For Being John Malkovich

Bobcat Goldthwaite

“Every week there’s a different equivalent of Charlie Sheen having a breakdown. I knew about Kim Kardashian getting married – and then getting divorced – and there’s no reason I should. I don’t have hostility toward Kim Kardashian – just toward the people who take that stuff seriously. Imagine being a grown adult and making a living reporting on the comings and goings of Snooki.”
~ Bobcat Goldthwaite

The Hunger Games Teaches You Nothing! Nothing!

“Suzanne Collins is like Philip K. Dick: on a sentence-by-sentence level you can quibble with her, but she possesses mastery of concept. The idea that reality television and government control will merge in the future to create something as off-putting and sexy as the Hunger Games is genius. Reading the book brings up great questions about celebrity (in a society of illusion, does truth make you famous?), identity (am I me, or am the “me” who people see on their screens?), and media blood-lust (who killed Davey Moore?). The people in my audience who hadn’t read the books didn’t care about these questions. They were mostly teenage boys and they were there for two reasons: to see people get killed and to prove they were cool.”
~  The Hunger Games Teaches You Nothing! Nothing! 

Steve Albini On Artistic Focus

“When I first started making records I would sit in front of the console concentrating on the music every second. I found out the hard way that I tended to fiddle with things unnecessarily and records ended up sounding tweaked and weird. I developed a couple of techniques to avoid this, to keep me from messing with things while still paying attention enough to catch problems. For a long time I would read, but it had to be really dry un-interesting stuff. The magazine the Economist was perfect, as were things like technical manuals and parts catalogs. I had a stack of them by the console. It can’t be anything interesting or with a story line like fiction because then you can get engrossed and stop paying attention to the session. It has to be really dull, basically so you are looking for an excuse to put it down and do something else. This has proven to be a really good threshold, so that if anything sounds weird or someone says something you immediately give it your full attention and your concentration hasn’t been ruined by staring at the speakers and straining all day. Lately I play Scrabble, and it serves the same purpose.”
~ Steve Albini On Artistic Focus

Lena Dunham Addresses Her Critics

“This show isn’t supposed to feel exclusionary. It’s supposed to feel honest, and it’s supposed to feel true to many aspects of my experience. But for me to ignore that criticism and not to take it in would really go against my beliefs and my education in so many things. And I think the liberal-arts student in me really wants to engage in a dialogue about it, but as I learn about engaging with the media, I realize it’s not the same as sitting in a seminar talking things through at Oberlin. Every quote is sort of used and misused and placed and misplaced… I wrote the first season primarily by myself, and I co-wrote a few episodes. But I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like—not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, ‘I hear this and I want to respond to it.’ And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.”
~ Lena Dunham Addresses Her Critics

The Filmmakers Who Inspire James Cameron

“I don’t find my inspiration in movies. I find my inspiration in life – in the natural world, in daily life. There are filmmakers that come along that are quite iconoclastic. And that I’m in awe of,  frankly. Zack Snyder’s 300. I think that was a really revolutionary film, because it was a completely deconstructive form of filmmaking in a way that nobody had done before, other than maybe Robert Rodriguez. That’s inspirational to me. Zhang Yimou’s films are inspirational to me. I have to see them multiple times to really see how he’s doing it and what exactly he’s doing that seems to work so well. So as a fan of film, there are certain films that come along that are just stunning to me, and I’ll study them.”
~ The Filmmakers Who Inspire James Cameron

Dargis On A Little Bit Of Heaven, Which Pulls Its Meet-Cute Right Out Of Its Heroine’s Ass

“Marley also has a hookup book that she regularly dips into for recreational sex. As she explains in the voice-over: ‘The whole matrimonial, maternal fairy tale’ isn’t for her. As any student of the contemporary romantic comedy knows, this is a lie, which becomes evident as soon as Marley, in what may be the worst ‘meet cute’ in the history of the genre, greets the doctor administering her colonoscopy. Even better (or worse), the probing doctor, Julian Goldstein, is played by Gael García Bernal, whose ability to keep a straight face is the only evidence here of his talent. Definitely worse is the vision of God (Whoopi Goldberg!) that Marley has during her colonoscopy, a hallucination that shifts a comically challenged movie into tonally unsteady territory that becomes straight-up unbearable when she learns she has cancer. From all her smiles, it’s the best thing to happen to Marley since blond tips, or so this witless movie would have you believe. The director Nicole Kassell fared a lot better with her first feature, The Woodsman, an astringent 2004 drama about a child molester, which was less painful than this movie.”
~ Dargis On A Little Bit Of Heaven, Which Pulls Its Meet-Cute Right Out Of Its Heroine’s Ass

From The Heart, And Soul, Of Harmin’ Armond White

“Legend says (and an eyewitness confirms) that at the 1974 New York Film Festival press screening of Celine and Julie Go Boating, Pauline Kael walked out in the middle announcing, “I’m going to the movies!” Apparently Jacques Rivette’s three-hour-plus fantasia on cinephilia wasn’t movie enough for her taste. Since then, the film has gained prestige among a particular breed of cinephile–the Kael-haters who also pompously decry a particular kind of accessibility and sensual or kinetic cinematic gratification in favor of “smartness.” These legions control today’s discourse… Rivette’s deliberately obscure tale has become iconic for the elitist cinephilia that now dominates contemporary film culture; it defines the festival circuit and internet hordes whose social pretensions have further divided audiences into intellectual and anti-intellectual positions at the exact moment that tabloid journalism (alligned with Hollywood patronization) has corrupted populist approaches to cinema. Celine and Julie is whimsical yet for a comedy it’s never really funny. t’s all so insidey that only their ponderousness is contagious, not their supposed delight. The titular “go boating” is a French phrase for jest or joking. Yet, this laborious caprice is always regarded in somber utterances; usually by critics who deplore lively screen sex or humor. Rivette’s deadpan cinephilia is what made Kael bolt in search of basic movie pleasure. Celine and Julie can be viewed as a proto-Mumblecore movie for its seemingly arbitrary storyline and self-infatuated preoccupation with cultural privilege. Indeed, Labourier and Berto’s bland antics resemble the mundane actions and unprepossessing actors of Mumblecore.The dull narcissism of Labourier and Berto connects Rivette’s method to rhythmless, lo-fi, indie rock. This isn’t just an alternative to commercial style; it’s a form of elitist denial. Though not ascetic, Rivette seems temperamentally incapable of the charm and esprit usually associated with cinematic pleasure–unless one sucks up to French snobbery like Jonathan Rosenbaum. Aesthetically the weakest of the New Wave pioneers, Rivette seems to betray the movement’s impulses. (Find James Monaco‘s excellent, out-of-print The New Wave for an [sic] reasonable explication.) Julie and Celine suggest no connection to the tragedy unfolding at their own behest; even as participants they remain blithe, un-implicated observers. (Note: This may have anticipated the affectlessness of contemporary indie art films.) Celine and Julie’s current vogue fits the prevalence of “anti” aesthetics, the preference for film style that is both anti-Hollywood and anti the traditional Hegelian form and Aristotelian humanism of the classic “art” cinema.”
~ From The Heart, And Soul, Of Harmin’ Armond White

Film Editor Mark Goldblatt On The Digital Handover

“It’s somewhat short-sighted. It reminds me of the destruction of so many negatives and prints of silent films and early films that are now forever lost. Digital cinema is here to stay, and digital delivery to theaters is obviously a lot less expensive than film. That said, it is a fact that digital archiving at this point is not the most reliable way to save precious film elements. There is also the argument that 35mm is a format that is really different from digital formats, and that photochemical capture is unique. It’s really the old debate of art-versus-commerce. What’s most unfortunate is that the revival houses, specialty cinemas, and cinematheques won’t be able to screen 35mm prints if the studios do away with them. It’s a really sad situation and I worry about preserving our cinematic heritage.”
~ Film Editor Mark Goldblatt On The Digital Handover

Martin Amis Talks “Money”

“I had this material about actors. They all want to redeem themselves through the character and are tremendously transparent about their insecurities and wanting to adjust the role to give them all the strengths they don’t have and to obliterate the weaknesses they suspect they have. That was really the idea for the film. John Self is trying to get a film going and it falls through in the most terrible way, just as the film of ‘Money’ fell through. As someone said, no one really knows why certain films get made and certain films don’t. Brian De Palma, whom I interviewed, said that what happens is that there are all these ideas swilling around in Hollywood, all these thoughtful discussions in the dens of the Moorish mansions of Los Angeles, and the ideas and projects sit around until someone who has power gets attached, then it goes through development with a writer and actors get connected to it, then it goes upstairs to the suits. Then a very mysterious decision is made, and either it goes forward or gets put into turnaround. De Palma said they only make the films they can’t get out of making and that everyone has absolute terror of taking responsibility.”
~ Martin Amis Talks “Money”

“Carnivàle”‘s Daniel Knauf Moves Along

“The traditional entertainment industry is not known for their humility. They tend to think they are the end all. You don’t take a TV show and put it on Hulu and call it Internet content. No, it’s not. It’s a TV show you’re watching on your computer. Hulu’s not really Internet, ‘Funny or Die’ is not really Internet; those are just TV being watched on a different screen. For me, I wanted to invent a narrative that there was absolutely no way you could have done it if the Internet wasn’t invented. That was the goal I set myself. In the end, I just got tired of trying to convince them this lives and breathes on the Internet. I got tired of explaining finance models to them and I thought, let’s just do an inexpensive version of this and show them. I had sold ‘Carnivàle’ off the Internet. I’ve always been into the Internet, and it stuck in my craw that the Internet wasn’t treated as the medium it could be. I’ve given up on Hollywood. They are too frightened. I’ve gone so far off the reservation. All I want to do is set up shop here in Nashville and build a studio and start making these things. If I had to monetize this right now, I would use surveys. I think they are the least intrusive. I don’t think I need people to watch ads every 30 seconds. I hate roll-ins, banners and pop-ups. I’d like to give people the option to subscribe and watch without surveys for a reasonable price. Choice is best. But let’s be realistic, in order to make these things, they cost money. I’m a huge believer in capitalism, and we’ll look for people to invest in this. Money follows the eyeballs. The money will come.”
~ “Carnivàle”‘s Daniel Knauf Moves Along

When Samuel L. Jackson Realized He Wasn’t Meant To Be Oliver Reed

“It was the life. I was in the theatre, the revolution. I fancied myself as Oliver Reed. Part of it is hereditary: my father died of alcoholism. I took it a step further, I drank and I used drugs. I liked the feeling of not being cognisant of what was going on around me. I didn’t rob people, I was working the whole time. I rehearsed and performed on drugs. I went on stage and watched people’s eyes roll across stage and I’d go ‘Oh I have a line, okay, got to focus on the play now.’ I guess I wanted to get caught. I ended up going to a party, drinking too much tequila and decided on the way home I needed to get cocaine and level myself out because I was drunk. I got home and cooked it. When I looked up, LaTanya and Zoe were standing there. The cocaine was cooked but I’d never smoked it. That was the first time LaTanya realised I was doing something that was greater than just smoking weed and drinking.
~ When Samuel L. Jackson Realized He Wasn’t Meant To Be Oliver Reed

John Cusack, Evermore, In An Everyday Interview

“Intellectual honesty should trump brand loyalty. Just because you might like how Obama handled the auto bailout doesn’t mean you should give him a pass on civil liberties. We all keep getting caught up in this argument over what’s good for the party. How about what’s good for the republic? The question is, who are we becoming once we throw out habeas corpus, once we start targeting our own citizens for assassination. We saw the power of the executive branch grow under Bush-Cheney. Obama’s only expanded that. In the end, people have to vote their conscience. It’s a complex question. It’s complex stuff. But in the end, for me, the answer couldn’t be simpler, which is that there are some things you can’t support. Politicians can’t take away our rights. We own those. They can’t act like that—in fact, the framers of the Constitution set it up the way they did precisely so they could not act like that.”
~ John Cusack, Evermore, In An Everyday Interview

Barry Sonnenfeld Is Primed For 3D

“I’ve always seen in 3-D and have always shot as if I was shooting in 3-D. There are certain things that 3-D really likes: on-axis and straight-ahead moves, which is all I’ve ever done as a director and cinematographer. And 3-D hates over-the-shoulder shots and panning and I hate panning. I never let the Coen brothers pan in their first three movies: I was all about the tableaux.”
~ Barry Sonnenfeld Is Primed For 3D

Ta-Nehisi Coates On Criticism Of “Girls”

Oliver Stone Differentiates

Stone: With Mission: Impossible, you have to hit these beats all the time.
MTV: It sounds like it’s not a regret for you.
Stone: It’s all steroids now. I mean Iron Man 2 is unwatchable, as is Transformers 2. It’s not my kind of moviemaking. Savages is a different kind of movie. It’s realistic and at the same time it has a bit of that summer pop feel.
~ Oliver Stone Differentiates

A. O. Scott Takes A Bite Out Of Darling Companion

“Dogs have no problem with clichés—why else would mine bark at the mailman every day?—but I suspect that even a patient and loyal hound would tire pretty quickly of the type of shopworn playwriting conventions that litter the Darling Companion screenplay, by Mr. Kasdan and his wife, Meg. Or maybe I’m just projecting my own impatience onto a more forthright and simple species. How much more fulfilling it would have been to spend those hundred-odd minutes chasing a squirrel, taking a nap or disemboweling a stuffed animal on the living room rug. But perhaps this is too harsh. Though it is not very good, Darling Companion is not actually unpleasant.”
~ A. O. Scott Takes A Bite Out Of Darling Companion