i'm basically making a theatrical melodrama. i'm using a conventional genre - women in peril - ... suddenly, this has become highly politicized. the fact is that if you put a man in peril, the audiences are not going to be as concerned... it's as simple as that.
the language of film is to do with dreams. something that touches your unconscious in a way that you so vividly remember.
(referenced) guilt is sometimes reality, and sometimes an obsessive vision in the minds of the characters. in either case, how these characters deal with their guilt determines the outcome of their lives - and of the film.
i don't dream much, because my dreams are all in my movies. i don't have nightmares because i work them all out in artistic form.
now come on. all these years of planning and you want me to scratch this?
all the characters have essentially positive motivations, whether they are good or evil. ... all these people are acting on essentially what they consider their best intentions, and they are all diametrically opposed.
the camera lies all the time; lies 24 times/second.
i haven't seen that. i must see it. i've heard so much about it. i guess i'm getting really disturbed by the fact that movies are getting so cruel and crude -- stabbings and choppings -- but it's all terrain that's been explored before, and unless you invoke it in a different way a good idea is going to look like all the other stuff that's around.
i am in the midst of a society that is very capitalist, and whose values i completely reject. but i, too, become a capitalist. the problem is that by even dealing with the devil, you become devilish to a certain extent. you need the machine. and once you use it, you are a tainted human being.
[ brian de palma ]
...we know that, behind every image revealed, there is another image more faithful to reality, and in back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see....
this is a film about someone who is following his destiny, a man watching reality as reported, the same way that i was watching him, in the same way that you are pursuing me...
there are moments when i seem to perceive, however confusedly, the why of certain things. when this happens, i become a combative optimist.... am i not still here, making films (good ones, bad ones, whatever) which are always against something and someone? isn't this obstinacy? and isn't this obstinacy itself a kind of optimism?
but as the film progresses, her emptiness becomes more obvious, echoed in the buildings and the landscape, and she finally decides on a life of solitude rather than marriage or a failing relationship.
it is a story told in images, and i hope people will be able to see in it not the birth of a delusory emotion but the method by which it is possible to delude oneself in one's feelings.
the idea that the distraction of wealth and fame cannot fill the void of loneliness, nor substitute for a soul's unrequited passion.
it is a study of the fallibility of modern communication, the obscuring of truth by modern iconography. The world beyond the trendy fashion photographer's ambience ceases to have permanence or meaning.
they don't mean anything when I do them -- just a mess, ... afterwards, i find something to hang onto ... and it sorts itself out, adds up -- it's like finding a clue in a detective story.
[ michelangelo antonioni ]
so you're a voyeur - the worst kind of thief
[sheryl crow]
pity if there's nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders!
but then again, what has the whale to say? seldom have i known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
and so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.
why then do you try to enlarge your mind? subtilize it.
[herman melville]
