Interviews
" If you look at painters and writers all through the centuries, there were violence and obscenity and things like that were part of their expression, and it wasn’t highbrow, but if you look at it now, these works have great artistic value."
"For me life is a competition; even if we don’t want to, we have to do this thing. To wake up, to go to your work…even if we don’t need these things, we have to do them. Life is working by elimination—you need this job, I want to do this movie—it means I’m gonna have to do better than someone else."
"If you pay attention to the critics that’s your problem, ’cause I don’t. What they say about it—they have to express their opinions to an audience that they know in a certain given number of words, and they do it in different ways… I don’t think they’re right, and I don’t agree with almost any of them, whether they’re pro or con."
"Once we had the story and did location scouting we knew we wanted to show some pretty dark sides of the Philippines, because we knew with the story we couldn’t show the pretty side and the beautiful side."
'I loved the portrayals of women in The Heartbreak Kid. It’s directed by Elaine May and written by Neil Simon. Woody Allen. I mean, he had the best female characters in the 70s and 80s. . . I don’t know, can you think of any? It’s so hard to think of female characters."
"It’s about making people as real and as human as possible, whatever their politics; and if you want to make them real, they can’t be on platforms giving lectures."
"It wasn’t until I went down to Austin, Texas, where I now live, that I would hear stories about Townes, because down in Austin he’s sort of a mythic figure and people in bars would tell me stories. I read an article about him and people always talked about how he lived his life for his art, and everything else fell away."
"Well, if you’re talking about the current climate, there’s a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don’t regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy."
"I find ghosts in Japanese horror much more terrifying. You have no chances of running away or fighting it; you’re stuck with it forever."
"Though I never had any manifesto or felt like I was on a particular mission, I do feel like it behooves me to make films that no one else will, and I did have a sense, as we did Funny Ha Ha, that it would at the very least be somehow unique."
"What is your responsibility to people whose love you have accepted but maybe you no longer join in that love? Culturally we’ve really talked a lot about taking care of the self, and that’s not necessarily illegitimate, but I think the process of taking care of each other can get lost in the shuffle. That is a big theme for me."
"In the environment in Thailand, everything is mixed. We absorb everything. When you look at Thai food, or fashion, or architecture, it’s like we don’t have any real identity. So I think when I make films I try to express what I experience just living."
"It’s important as a notion when we’re going overseas, whether we’re in Bolivia or Iraq or Afghanistan or France or wherever we happen to be, just because we think we’re right doesn’t mean we’re going to convince other people that we’re right. Other people have a reason for believing what they believe."
"There are many levels of meaning in all my movies, but I don’t think that there is a level that is nobler or wiser than another. If one wants to look at film as pure entertainment and chooses to merely enjoy the nice lighting—it’s perfect for that. But if others want to dig, they can go deeper. But they won’t be more right. They’ll just be deeper."