The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you're still friends with the rest of your life.
Richard Linklater
No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.
Every day's a hustle.
My dad's chill. He's the guy who, you wreck the car, he says, 'Well, nobody was hurt. It's just some metal.'
As a little kid, you go where your parents drag you. You have no agency, no dominion.
As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.
Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There's a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.
Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.
Trump has a lot less than he says he does.
Ulrik Ottinger was the most real and experimental of all the German New Wave directors. She was probably the most out-there, too. She's a fascinating artist in that world.
No one believes this, but when I'm working, it's the same, whether I'm working on 'Bad News Bears,' 'Before Sunset,' 'A Scanner Darkly,' or 'Fast Food Nation.' I'm the same person, trying to make it work.
I really do remember everything. I see people I haven't seen in 20 years, and I can talk with them about what we talked about outside the high school.
I like films that just put you in someone's world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you'd care about them.
I guess I was just always one of those guys who asked those fundamental questions: 'Who am I? What's this for? Why? What does this mean? Is this real?' All these pretty basic questions. I like making movies about people who are self-conscious in that way, and are trying to feel their way through the world.
I have an uncomfortable groove, 'cause I have a lot of different kinds of stories to tell.
I remember when I made 'A Scanner Darkly,' going, 'I hope people see it in theater - but I think it's going to be seen in someone's room at two in the morning.' It's that kind of movie. And I would have loved if it had been available on multiple formats at the moment it opened.
The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It's diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics.
Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size.
When I saw 'subUrbia' on stage, I started having those feelings inside me. I saw it as a film, and I felt I knew the characters, or I was the characters. It really dredged up all this stuff in me that never went away.
If you want to just make a good movie, if you don't enjoy every step and become a master of each little moment, then you shouldn't be doing it.
The arts were like, there's no opponent. It's just yourself. I'm not saying they don't make the arts a competition with awards and all that, but that's outside the work itself.
I think people forget how radical the narrative of 'Slacker' is. There's no story, you know? We could go from one character to the next to the next and never return.
Well, you have to keep your faith in the fact that there are a lot of intelligent people who are actively looking for something interesting, people who have been disappointed so many times.
I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American.
Some films really do take years to get going, but I'd say that most of the films I want to do are slightly smaller projects. Some could be sketches. They're not all oil paintings.
The truth will only be told over a career.
I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.
A college athlete is going to be competitive. You don't get to that level if you're not.
Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.
I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.
I look up and go, 'I'm living in the world I visualized a long time ago.' From making movies, to the Film Society, to just being in a film world. It's a life that I wanted to inhabit. I think everyone has the opportunity to do that in this world - it's just, are you gonna work for it, and how much does it mean to you?
Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.
Artists are great. They jump in.
I was dating girls who were actresses, and that was fun, so I took a playwriting class. But that was short-lived. That was one year. Around that time, I was seeing movies that were making me think in terms of images.
I realized a long time ago that, even as a kid, it's all about the choices you make, the things you pursue. In the end, you're a sum of your choices.
You're always just trying to make your film, tell the story you're trying to tell - best you can, you know.
I always say I'll never make a film in Austin in summer, but I always end up here.
I grew up in a little town in east Texas where it was really not on the table to question certain things like whether you should eat meat or not.
One minute you're starting left fielder, hitting home runs; the next, it's career over. I was 20.
I always thought that I had a pretty diverse body of work, I mean, as far as subject matter. Teenage rock and roll movie; romance; '20s Western. On paper it looks different, but then there's similarities in the vibe of them.
Here in Central Texas, you drive west, you get the desert; you drive east, you get the woods; you've got water, you've got urban environments, you've got country. So you can hit a lot of notes.
I want cinema to be a part of my life. It's natural for me.
If you make a film about childhood, you've got to pick a moment - you know, 'The 400 Blows.'
I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.
There are really a lot of dark shadings to a lot of my stuff.
There are really smart baseball players. It's a thinking person's game.
I worked offshore as an oil worker for a couple of years.
Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn't bad. It's a good lesson in human hubris.
'The Newton Boys' was the one time I've made a film with really active characters who weren't at all self-reflexive and just plowed through their lives. There's a part of everyone that's like that. We have a biological imperative to keep living, keep moving forward... We have no choice.
I remember playing for coaches who seemed like military-type guys. It always rubbed me the wrong way.
