Charlie Kaufman Quotes
-
The sad thing about working on a movie is that you can never see the movie.
→ -
I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.
→ -
I have a lot of anxiety about medical things for example. I don't think I'm particularly good at it, but I'd had the practice when I went into shooting Synecdoche. It can be somewhat gratifying, too, because I don't have that relationship with other adults where I need to comfort them or they come to me for that.
→ -
I do have, at different times, a certain kind of self-consciousness in the world, an insecurity.
→ -
I choose to write characters from the inside because I feel like that's the way I'm gonna get the most honest version of them.
→ -
And then to see the whole movie, you're pretty much waiting until the end of production. And the major lifting in terms of editing and all that stuff is done before you shoot the movie. That's an unusual way to work.
→ -
People ask me all the time, "What are your influences? Are you trying to do Beckett?" It's like, "No, I'm trying to do me." Whatever that is. I don't know what that is, but that's the basis. I'm trying to be true and I'm trying to be honest.
→ -
She was nice. Nice is good.
→ -
I don't subscribe to anything. I sit there and I try to think about what seems honest to me.
→ -
David Lynch is very important to me, and he does dreamlike movies, but my dreams are not like David Lynch's dreams. I have no interest in copying anybody's work. It would never occur to me to want this to look like someone else's thing.
→ -
Writing is a journey into the unknown.
→ -
If you create something that is asking for people to respond as they're going to respond, you have to allow them to respond as they're going to respond. Some of the people are going to be uninterested and some people are going to be mad for some reason, which is their business. That's just the way the world is.
→ -
I think now that I've tried directing, I'm not interested in doing adaptations anymore. I could do an adaptation of someone else's work that I would write, but the idea of taking someone else's material entirely doesn't interest me. One of the things that I found really helpful, at least in my mind - and I've never discussed this with the actors or with the people I work with - is that being a neophyte in directing, I feel like I have a kind of authority simply because I'm the writer as well.
→ -
And so not only do you have to make that work, you can't really start putting the thing together in any form because some of the shots are very short and obviously many of them take so long, you're waiting months and months and months before you can see if it's going to be working emotionally.
→ -
I think there are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. We romanticize everything about people in movies. One of the things I don't like in movies is that people feel alone with their bodily functions in the real world, as if people in the movies don't do these things.
→ -
I'm not working on anything. I was trying to write something new . . . I guess the goal for me now, at least at this point, is to try to direct again.
→ -
Do not simplify. Do not worry about failure. Failure is a badge of honour. It means you risked failure.
→ -
Yeah, once we decided to use that replacement animation, and the seams are a function of that animation, and other movies paint those out, we decided we wanted to keep the presence of the animation and the type of animation that it was rather than make it look polished. It created a kind of vulnerability, I think.
→ -
I just try to be honest, because I think that's part of my job description as a writer.
→ -
Clementine: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon. Joel: I know. Clementine: What do we do? Joel: Enjoy it.
→ -
I think directing and writing are very different jobs. Obviously, directing is a more social and managerial job. The other thing about directing is that it's a very, very pragmatic job, and writing isn't.
→ -
I'm not a celebrity. I'm intentionally and defiantly not a celebrity. I don't have any interest in it. I don't have any talent for it. I keep my personal life out of my public life as cleanly as I can.
→ -
I do a lot of things intuitively. I'm not often consciously aware of what I'm doing. It's like in a dream: There's something going on that's powerful but you don't know exactly why.
→ -
We're all subjective beings and trapped in our own realities and our own biographical stories and physical bodies and our histories - and that's the only way we can experience the world.
→ -
I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.
→ -
I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.
→ -
There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.
→ -
You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything more lonely than that?
→ -
I feel like I want to keep moving toward idiosyncracy. Personal, personal, personal.
→ -
You get a kind of surreal feeling and also it allows you to focus on the things we want you to focus on in a new way - the stuff that's very small and mundane that happens in a person's life when they're in a hotel room. There's more interest because you're seeing a puppet do things that you're very familiar with that you might not notice if it was a human doing it.
→
Related Authors
-
Spike Jonze Director -
Tom Noonan Actor -
Dianne Wiest Actress -
Michelle Williams Actress -
Jennifer Jason Leigh Film actress -
Samantha Morton Actress -
Chuck Barris Producer -
Philip Seymour Hoffman Actor -
Michel Gondry Film director -
Kate Winslet Actress -
David Thewlis Actor -
Chris Cooper Film actor -
Catherine Keener Film actress -
Jim Carrey Actor -
Susan Orlean Journalist -
Robert McKee Author -
John Cusack Actor -
Nicolas Cage Actor -
John Malkovich Actor -
Paul Thomas Anderson Film director