Quotes

What I remember myself from films, and what I love about films, is specific scenes and characters.

If Richard Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the 'Great Art Form' would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.

[on meeting David Blaine] The first time I hung out with him, he took me to this condemned building, and it had a pizza oven [inside], and he crawled into the pizza oven and turned the heat on to 400 degrees, or something like that, and he stayed in it for, I guess, a half hour. He came out, and except for one or two second-degree burns, he was unscathed. You meet a lot of musicians and filmmakers and actors, but it's rare to meet someone who can step inside a pizza oven and take the heat. I was intrigued by that.

After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.

I never cared so much about making perfect sense. I wanted to make perfect nonsense. I wanted to tell jokes, but I didn't give a fuck about the punch line.

When I'm directing films, I mostly try to create an environment on set that mimics what's in my mind, as to the tone and feel of things. I try to create a place where you feel that anything's possible. Everyone's in character all the time to a degree, everyone's in costume all the time. You want to create an environment where these characters really exist, and then it's about me finding it. A lot of times, I'll give six or seven different scripts out with alternate endings, with different character lines, with different pieces of dialogue. A lot of times, the actors think they're working on different films.[2008]

When I was a child the temptation to sin was always a romantic option. This romantic option lead me to the cinema, a place where sin was welcome.

Cinema sustains life. It captures death in its progress.

[on his unfinished film "Fight Harm" where he randomly picked fights with real people] I wanted to make the great American comedy that would just consist entirely of me getting beat up, like a condensed slapstick comedy where you slip on a banana peel. I was really just trying to give people the greatest laugh of their life.

I never really feel wrong while making movies. I know myself and I know that my intentions are pure and I'm on the side of righteousness... I always wanted the films to play in malls, and I wanted as many people as possible to see them. I never want them to be marginalized in the kind of rarefied, elitist world. I always have hopes that the films will permeate culture in a big way. A lot of times I'm wrong, but it's always the hope.

[on his life after directing Gummo (1997) ] I felt like Clint Eastwood except you know, from a different time and different place. I'm thinking about the Clint Eastwood with the orangutan [Every Which Way But Loose (1978)]. It's hard to say things without coming off in a certain way, but at a young age, I felt very driven. All I ever wanted to be is a soldier of cinema.

[on his cinematic inspirations for Spring Breakers (2012)] A lot of it came from things I'd experimented with when shooting ads and trying different techniques. The movie I watched most, believe it or not, was Michael Mann's Miami Vice (2006). The reason I love his movies, and that movie in particular, is I could feel the place. When I watch that film, I don't even pay attention to what they're saying or the storyline. I love the colors, I love the texture. [2012]

[on Mister Lonely (2007)] I basically started thinking in terms of images that really have nothing to do with anything. Just simple images. I started dreaming about flying nuns, falling out of airplanes and praying the whole way down and surviving. Then I started to fixate upon specific images and characters. One of them was the idea of a Michael Jackson impersonator walking the streets of Paris. I had these different images although they really don't have anything to do with one another. But I knew that there was something in there that I was trying to get out, a unified idea, but I wasn't sure how to say it. [2007]