We build our legacy piece by piece, and maybe the whole world will remember you or maybe just a couple of people, but you do what you can to make sure you're still around after you're gone.
David Lowery
Time goes by so slowly when you're a child, and then, as an adult, it goes by in the blink of an eye.
I'm not searching for the meaning of life, but I'm looking for a meaning within my life.
I'm a deeply romantic person, nostalgic to a fault.
The relationships I've had with animals are often some of the most profound. That's why you cry when a dog dies in a movie. The connection is so deep and so profound, and it isn't cluttered by humanity.
When I was a kid, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, my stuffed animals - they were real. There is the tremendous suspension of disbelief that you have as a child. It's harder as an adult.
'Ain't Them Bodies Saints' wound up becoming a love story even though it was not initially meant to be one.
I made 'St. Nick' on a 30-page outline. 'Aint' Them Bodies Saints' was a full-bodied script, but it still had a lot of room for improvisation. There were scenes that weren't there on the page - just a sentence saying something happens. I was like, 'We'll figure this out when we shoot it.'
I guess you can't really turn a camera on outside in Texas without getting Terrence Malick comparisons.
I don't like being pessimistic. I don't like living my life with a nihilistic mindset.
If I can't finish a screenplay, if I can't get to the last page as a writer, it probably means it's not a good movie for me to make.
I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe in ghosts.
I have a repository of titles I like in my head, and I am always looking for a movie that I can put one on.
I was raised in a deeply Catholic family. There was a sense that everything we were doing was to prepare ourselves for an afterlife in heaven. In my teenage years, that became less important to me. Eventually, that turned into agnosticism, which became atheism.
No two people who make a movie on a certain budget scale are going to achieve the same thing because it just depends on what sort of favors you can call, and what sort of dynamics you can pull in the play.
I think, with 'St. Nick,' when you're working with a smaller budget, you have fewer risks involved. You're able to take chances with style and content.
With the transcendent or supernatural, they help us contextualize our own lives while we are here on this earth. On a narrative level, as a storyteller, they are a wonderful tool and technique by which to explore those hopes, those fears, those existential dilemmas that we all face from time to time.
I think all people are familiar with thinking about their death and trying to come to terms with the fact that we will, at some point, no longer exist. The loss of one's ego is very tough to reconcile with; you really have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to wrap your head around the idea of just not existing anymore.
I never put a premium on making a living. It was never one of those things that was important to me.
I love 'Peter Pan' to death. It's one of the most influential pieces of storytelling in my life. It made a huge impact on how I grew up. I love the cartoon. I love the 2003 version.
The first movie I ever saw in the cinema was Walt Disney's 'Pinocchio,' upon its 1984 re-release, which would have put me at three years old.
I often conflate the domestic and the cosmic on a daily basis.
One of my earliest memories, movie-related or otherwise, is of seeing a man dunking a man's head in a toilet on television, and my mom telling me that this is what would happen to me if I ever joined the Army. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I would discover that this was a scene from 'The Great Santini,' starring Robert Duvall.
If your financiers care about the movie, they will be involved in a very constructive fashion, but it can get out of hand very quickly, and that is something to be aware of in any type of filmmaking.
I've never had an actual haunting experience, in the way you might anticipate a ghost in a movie haunting someone, but I do feel presences around me all the time, and I do feel that memories haunt us the way ghosts haunt us or might haunt characters in a film.
In dialogue scenes, my favorite moments are when people aren't talking because you can cut to the heart of the matter much more quickly, often with a look. People hide things in words. When you don't have words to hide things in, it becomes much more direct and much more immediate of a connection.
There are some stories - not even stories, some feelings - that you can't accomplish in cinema without using celluloid.
I like to make movies in Texas because that's where I learned how to do it. I know the industry there, I know the people, I know the crews. But it's hard to make films in Texas.
Making movies is hard for me. Being on set is very trying. I'm not good at being that communicative for that long. Editing is where I'm happiest.
It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.
A great sense of morality was instilled in me through my upbringing in the Catholic faith - particularly because my father is a moral theologian. And morality is something I believe exists separate from faith, as an intrinsic human quality that one should aspire to understand and participate in.
David Lynch's 'Fire Walk With Me' has a scene in it that scared me so bad that I don't remember it. I blocked the memory out - repeatedly! I've seen the film two or three times, and I can never remember what it is that scares me.
My wife and I, we knew each other back in 2001 but had fallen out of touch. One day, I had a dream about her and wrote her a note on Facebook - I was living in L.A. at the time - and that turned into six months of just letter-writing. It started off with Facebook messages and turned into emails and eventually became actual hand-written letters.
I want to live a very positive and optimistic life that has a wonderful outlook on the future and the impact that I will have on the world and the people around me.
With any movie that gets remade, whether I like the remake or not, I'm glad that I can still go watch the original that I love. If the remake is offering something different, I really value that because I'm having a new experience and adding something new to my life.
The very first film I ever made, when I was seven years old, when I got my hands on a camcorder, was a remake of 'Poltergeist,' which I hadn't seen yet because my parents wouldn't allow me to. But I made my own version of it, and it starred my brother in a bed sheet.
I realized that filmmaking is an eminently scalable act. No matter how big or how small, there's joys and stresses that will all scale themselves magnificently to fit the production.
I find myself very attached to the places I live, and moving is never easy for me.
I think there is a value in leaving the world a little better off, and movies can do that in a minor way.
I love what Paul Thomas Anderson did with 'The Master' with putting out those teasers made up of footage that's not in the movie.
Digital is my safety net. I know how to use it, how to operate those cameras; it makes sense to me. Film is much more mysterious.
You always want your movies to reach the widest audience possible.
Hindsight is the most dangerous thing imaginable for me. I imagine that's the case for most filmmakers. And I would love to be a filmmaker who was an exception to that rule, but I'm certainly not.
I've always endeavored to make movies with my friends.
I like roller coasters that have the one 70-foot drop.
I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.
I love working with the same people. When I find someone I love and that I like working with, I don't want to stop working with them.
Casey Affleck is someone I want to work with again. We almost had him on 'Pete's Dragon,' but his scheduling issues didn't work out.
Virginia Woolf's literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Orlando,' all of which have time as a central conceit.
Some filmmakers are great at making complex things and films with a lot of moving parts, and I'm just not that way.
