I think often people fall into the breadth trap of wanting to do too long a period of time, and obviously there's this sort of algorithm of how much depth you can put into something times how much of their life you're trying to show. My attitude has always been, I'd rather show a briefer period of time in more detail than a longer period of time in less detail.
I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too. Stuff I like is getting trashed and stuff that is being praised I think is terrible. I don't really feel in sync with what's happening, but at the same time, what I think keeps me afloat is that I try not to be, and don't want to be, very indulgent. I try to make the films as lean as possible, and to not spend a lot of time crawling up my own ass creatively.
Everybody, including me, has to submit to what it needs to be. The thing is at the top of the pyramid, the best version of the thing; we all have to serve that. You forget that at your own risk. And I think movies are too long, in general.
You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn't. It's fascinating.
I'm not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post.And it means nothing to the audience. I'll chop limbs off. I'll put an arm where a leg should be. I'll do anything.
It's a world in which people's motives are questionable and shadowy.
I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.
My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen.
The muscle memory of filtering away all the wrong versions of what you're doing improves the more time you're on a film set. I feel like my problem-solving algorithm got kicked up a notch.
When you get a certain level of resources, and you want things a certain way, I find it difficult to get too belligerent because it's not my money.In this case it is. It’s a lot easier to stand your ground and say “I want it like this” when you know it’s your money you’re spending.
What's great about things like Kickstarter is that it enables me, finally, and without any bad feeling at all, when people come up to me now saying, "I want to do this." I can just go, "There are no excuses anymore."
There's a big difference between a movie about relationships and a movie in which people talk about relationships. It seems like a lot of people have confused the two.
I've found through experience that I'm only good when I'm writing something that, in essence, only I could write. The times I've written for hire, for other people, I don't think I've done very well.
I think '60s are appealing to creative people, because it seemed to be a time of endless possibilities, when the boundaries of what could be considered popular culture were being expanded almost by the week. It doesn't feel like that anymore. At times, I wish it were so. Radio is a perfect example; good God, I mean, back then the most interesting songs were also hits, and that's just not true anymore. It hasn't been true in a long time.
That's why my attitude, even on my larger-scale movies, is to make them cheap. The less these things cost, the better for everybody.
I want to form a political party that's based entirely on what music people listen to. To me, it's a much better barometer of what they think and feel than their political stance.
I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did.
There are people who are originals and the stuff they make really is new. It isn't based on anything else. But I've decided I'm not that-I was never that. My abilities are to synthesize a wide range of references and ideas into something that feels relatively unified and coherent.
I recently decided that I'm not an originator. I'm a synthesist.
I find myself in situations a lot where I have to say to someone, "This can be better," and it's hard to say that.
The traditional models for success are just also disappearing.
I think the feeling that we're going to work together again usually starts to come up before the first project's even done. The Black Keys and I have already talked about starting on something new.
You can't change who you are, so I think that the only thing you can do is just never talk to people about stuff and then hope that maybe does something.
I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level.
I guess I just look at talent as a very subjective thing. I mean, if you never tried playing an oboe, how do you know you're not the most talented oboe player ever? The point is that if you don't love it, then it doesn't matter.
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