James Gray Quotes
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Sean Penn has announced his retirement from acting about 72 times.
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I grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York. And my family and my grandparents and my father's from Brooklyn, and so you're essentially an outer boroughs kid, you're growing up.
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I was going to Studio 54 when I was 12 years old. It's true. It's crazy.
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When I was younger, I felt it essential to see every movie ever made. Now I feel as though I've got to read every book, see every art show, watch every play and opera and concert and so on. It does not end, and of course there is truth in the old cliche that the more one knows, the more one realizes one knows nothing at all.
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What a director really does is set the emotional temperature and the mood and the level, amount, or lack of, distance between the action and the character, and the character and the audience.
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The decision about digital or film is going to be made for us. I think the answer is that film is gonna be gone, although I think it'll make a comeback; it'll be like vinyl records or something.
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If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.
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What I do have to get across is the truth of the moment within the given scene. It's my job, as a director and screenwriter, to create the environment in which all those moments will come together eventually.
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Film is better than digital in every way. It has better contrast ratio, better blacks, and better color reproduction. It's a more organic image, which is more the way your eyes see.
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The life of a film is very strange. Once the film is done, you wish you could forget about it and move on.
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The closer you can get to being personal, the better the work is, or the more interesting the work is.
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At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.
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My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.
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When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter.
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There's virtually nothing made up in 'The Immigrant.' So much of the film came from somewhere in my family's past. All the details are from my own family.
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The conventional wisdom is that people come to the United States, and immigration is so great, and they say, 'America, what a great country.' And a lot of that is true.
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I live up Laurel Canyon, and if I want to walk with my son, I have to drive to the park, which is so insane to me.
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I suppose I'm always trying to break down the wall between my characters and myself. I'm trying to make the film as expressive and personal as I can, even if I can't explain, for example, how important it is for me to be Jewish.
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I went to see 'Star Trek Into Darkness,' and J.J. Abrams, who's a friend of mine, made this film, and I went to see it at the premiere. Believe it or not, I was really blown away by the comic timing of it.
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Anyone who starts badmouthing Latino immigrants is not only a racist but ignorant. You need to refer them to what was written about the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, any group you want.
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I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
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I know this sounds phony, but I don't start out on a project going, 'I'm going to make an emotional work,' you know what I mean? You try to tell the story directly and honestly and with passion.
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'Apocalypse Now' does not alienate us or deconstruct itself. In fact, it welcomes us in.
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I've been a Yankees fan for a long time. When I was a kid in the mid-'70s, the Yankees were really great. They had Reggie Jackson in '77. I was 8 years old at the time. He hit three home runs to win the World Series in game six against the Dodgers, and I was just hooked.