Derek Cianfrance Quotes
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When I cast someone in a movie, I have to absolutely trust who they are as a human being. Trust is the intangible of moviemaking.
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When I cast great actors, I try to make extraordinary people ordinary, dealing with these extremely small intimate details of interpersonal relationships against an epic backdrop.
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One reason Cassavetes is a hero to me is that his movies grew with him; they reflected the stages of his life. He made movies about where he was at that time. That's what I want to do with my films.
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I don't really collect anything. I grew up in a family that collected things, and then they'd get sick, and people die, and then they have their basements full of stuff that goes from one box to the next, so I try not to get sentimental with stuff. I just try to collect memories; I guess that would be it.
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I don't have a life, really. I take my kids to school, and I go home, and I write. Then I go pick my kids up, make them dinner, put them to bed, and write some more.
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When we make these movies, you sign up for an experience. It's not just, 'Action! Cut!' There's not that safety in it. It's kind of a dangerous place to be. I mean, it is safe, but it gets personal. It's no longer about saying the lines. It's about really having an experience.
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There's something so great when you're watching a movie when you slowly get to know somebody more, because it's like a real relationship.
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I'm not the greatest reader. I feel like I have a bit of dyslexia or something, and that's probably why I became a filmmaker. I have the need to communicate, the need to tell stories; and the need to understand stories led me to movies.
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Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world.
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When I was a kid, I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war, and the other was that my parents would get a divorce; and when I was twenty, they split up, and I just felt like I needed to confront all those things that scared me as a kid - entering young adulthood and trying to have relationships.
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I feel like the job in editing is to let the movie tell you what it is. So again, it's like sculpture. You just start taking away, you add a nose here, you cut off, like, the side of the cheek over here in the crease, and you have a face. But it really reveals to you what it means to be over time, and if you have enough time.
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When people think of biblical movies, they imagine sweeping epics like 'The Ten Commandments.' But 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' is essentially a documentary about Jesus. It made me aware of how real life and personal experience can create more breathtaking, sensitive cinema than more sophisticated techniques.
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Right now, I think I have time to be three things, in no particular order: a father, a husband, and a filmmaker. That's why I don't go out - I have no space for it. I feel like one of those main things would suffer.
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From making documentaries all these years, it doesn't feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I'm always trying to shoot as though it's really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I'm going to be following. I want to follow them.
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After 'Place Beyond the Pines,' honestly, I was sick of myself. Sick of my own ideas. I wanted to do an adaptation, but everything I'd been reading, I just didn't understand it.
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Lars Ulrich, he was my hero growing up. I wanted to be like him. I played the drums.
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I think 'GoodFellas' is just a perfect film. From an efficiency of storytelling standpoint, from an entertainment standpoint, from a performance standpoint, from a use of music standpoint, from a cinematography and editing standpoint - to me, it's just a perfect movie.
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Seeing 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' was an extraordinary experience because it made me realise that all the biblical stories and images I'd ignored as a child had sunk in by osmosis. I saw that my childhood was deeply rooted inside me.
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It's like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life and just watch them swim. That's what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.
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The only time I judge an actor on set is if they're not failing; if they get it right all the time, I start to question it. I feel like it's too easy.
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Now, I love movies so much, but I find a lot of movies to be arrogant in the way they're kind of know-it-alls - they have perfect characters on the screen that know everything about themselves.
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I have kids. I can't hardly watch an afternoon football game with them without having to turn off the TV during the commercials. It's too much. I don't know when violence was deemed such a cinematic thing.
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With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.
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I feel like the job of an artist is to confront their own darkness and their own demons and fears. And I want to make movies that feel human up on the screen. I don't really relate to dudes wearing spandex and capes.