Interviews
"I made this film because people have been making fun of the seventies. And I think that’s because the dreams people had at that time are still considered a threat. I would never make fun of kids who rejected the material values of the world, and who considered that life was about some sort of political or spiritual path."
"I mean, it comes from everywhere. I don’t think that everything is rational or that I’m aware of everything. I proceed like a collector not knowing what kind of collection I’m making, but I’m collecting something."
"One of the first things I learned is that in a lot of cases, these groups don’t use clocks or calendars or anything that lets people keep track of time. It ties into some aspects of Buddhist philosophy, that there’s no such thing as the past."
"When I was writing there were funders that thought I should make it less explicit, or less gay. But I just thought I would make it as honestly as I could, to be as honest as I could about how these characters would act."
"I approached this as a landscape film, with the challenge of rendering the Kiefer landscape into a film document. My approach is choreographic, in that I am interested in the representation of space in film."
"I don’t really believe there’s much difference between fiction and documentary. I think it’s basically all film, in which people play themselves by way of performing."
"Whether you’re making a film or writing a novel, you’re dealing less with the political and much more with the personal questions, personal dramas. The political aspects are supplementary."
"I remember in my childhood telling stories to my sisters and I was continuously fabulada, making fables, narrating. So my first vocation and my ultimate vocation is to narrate and tell stories."
"In Japanese society dead people have a different sort of presence; if you’ve done something bad, you might say, “Oh, I can’t face my ancestors.” Japanese people are very aware and conscious of the presence and effect of dead people in their everyday lives."
" It is important to blur the line between what is real and what is not and to get people to think about reality and perception. If you show everything, you make this path very clear and precise, and it doesn’t help the film."
"In our documentaries, we focused on moments in history that we had known as kids or that preceded us with the workers’ movement, but essentially we always focused on individual trajectories, individual portraits. And maybe that’s the link with our fiction work."
"I’m an anxious person. What I like best is to smoke cigarettes and listen to music. A perfect day for me is a day with coffee, cigarettes, and music, to quote Jim Jarmusch."
"We process thoughts and feelings as images. They echo within and stay with us. Cinema has a capacity of capturing those moments."
"Using film is also a psychological issue. For the director, and the actors, it creates a different kind of concentration. You understand you have just one attempt to make this."