Interviews
'With Alzheimer’s you can have these extremely vivid, potent, emotional memories that aren’t necessarily connected to articulated facts or events. So she has these moments where she instinctually remembers how she feels about her husband, but doesn’t remember who he is."
"I live in this society, and all my subjects come from things I see around me and things that affect me personally. And this also came from something that happened to me personally. I wanted to go see a soccer game a few years ago, and my daughter, who was twelve years old at the time, wanted to go with me."
"There was so much to take care of as a director to make the film, and there are no sci-fi or visual effects film traditions in Korea. The Host is a small budget film in the Hollywood standard, but it is a big film in Korea."
"The cult of the genius is one of the movie’s subjects, but he considers himself to be an artist, and therefore the objects of attraction that become his victims are just elements of a sculpture. In his amoral perspective, he never really considers them to be victims."
"Inland Empire was all scripted, scene by scene, but there was no indication of a feature film. Each scene was specific, had to be a certain way. Then, after five or six scenes, another whole bunch of things started coming, revealing the possibility of a feature."
"I tried to keep the filmmaking from being distracting. Besides, when you are working with a six-person crew, you are hoping a lot of the limitations will end up serving you and add to the fragility of the story. Also, by keeping the apparatus very small, it is invisible to us when we make the film."
" 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."