David MacKenzie Quotes

In America there's no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

Hardly any filmmakers can just make anything they want. Obviously, there are some exceptions, like Steven Spielberg, but he has that mainstream mentality and the kinds of films he loves to make are the kind that appeal to this big, mass audience.

Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.

In America, they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent.

Those big films are scary things. There's so much money behind those things. There's that hype. You enter a machine.

I realised that success and pure creativity are not very compatible. The more successful you become, the more you become a product of something that generates money. Instead of being able to move forward freely and do what you really wish, you find yourself stuck and obliged to repeat yourself and your previous success.

Movies are not an art form where you get to kind of sit in your art gallery and paint, you know? You don't do that. You're spending a lot of somebody else's money.

When you watch a film like 'Warning,' you would realize that it can't be made with stars.

It's always a challenge to make an independent film. It's always a challenge to make a low budget film.

I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.

The spirit of Burzum never changed, but my ability to make music changed dramatically when I was imprisoned. It is more or less impossible to record music in prison, and the only music I could record was electronic music, when I was allowed to have a synthesizer for a few months in 1994 or 1995 and in 1998.

It's nice to stretch in different directions and use different muscles. You can get swallowed into Hollywood, where it's all about bums on seats and how commercial a film is.

When I met Ram Charan, he told me not to worry about how much my films make. After 'Magadheera,' people began expecting big things from him. So he did films to keep up to that expectation. He advised me to not fall into that trap.

I don't make films for critics, and I'm not particularly interested in what they have to say, and they don't have a bearing on my audiences.

You can do a formula film and walk the conventional path, but it may not work at all.

No studio picks up the phone after seeing 'Dogtooth' and goes, like, 'We have the next superhero movie.' Though if one did, that would be an interesting studio to work with.

Growing up, I wanted to make the kind of movies that would play in a multiplex, and those were the kinds of movies I ended up making.

Without the huge budgets, mainstream Bengali cinema falls flat on its face.

My last film as director, the National Award winning 'Zakhm,' barely managed to break even. So why should I listen to so-called sensibilities of a handful of critics?

Making independent films is liberating. It eliminates self-censorship, which mainstream films are infected with due to commercial priorities.

I am not crazy about doing Hollywood films.

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

The ratings thing is the real issue. It really hurts movies. For example, in Redbelt, I smoked. The whole plot of my character was based on the fact that I was a smoker. And then they discovered that just by having someone smoking in the movie, it immediately makes the rating an R. So they had to cut out every shot where I had a cigarette in my hand and it totally affected the performance. That was very frustrating to David Mamet as well. I can remember him saying, "It's a nightmare."

Maybe I'll just write books. I'd like to make another movie, but I don't want to go back and [do] what they want you to do, to make it for a million dollars. I did that. I don't need a lot, but I need what I used to get, and they don't give you that anymore.

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.