Elvis Mitchell Quotes

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.

There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there's certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.

I don't think American independent films have ever really been particularly experimental, except for the original guys from the '60s who were huge influences, like Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, and Stan van der Beek. They were the true independents.

Take a film of Jacques Tati like Mon Oncle which has something quite new - for me, unique - in it.

In Blow-up I used my head instinctively!

I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene.

I loved 'Goodbye to Language.'

When I made '101 Reykjavik,' people talked about 'Almodovar on ice.' When I made 'The Sea,' people referenced Bergman.

I went to film school, and I came in when video art was king, weird stuff was king, and there, you don't have a script as your bible.

Locke' is a different way of making a film as well as being a different sort of film.

I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, 'Film Socialisme.'

In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.'

I grew up watching all these crazy movies, European movies and stuff, and I guess that I always laughed at things that were a little more offbeat.

I would certainly say that films like Time Code and the Loss of Sexual Innocence were far more rewarding to me in terms of being able to move forward as a filmmaker.

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

Cronenberg's a lot of fun, and that a lot of people don't know watching his movies. He doesn't take himself seriously. He's still reinventing himself.

Wong Kar-Wai is a really great inspiration. He's always referred to as the Jimi Hendrix of filmmaking.

Capra is an old-time movie craftsman, the master of every trick in the bag, and in many ways he is more at home with the medium than any other Hollywood director. But all of his details give the impression of contrived effect.

I'd like to be in a Spike Jonze movie. But I live in a Nancy Meyers movie.

And my generation in Brazil was influenced by Cinema Novo. So we're echoing what's been done way in the past.

As soon as someone like me or David Lynch pops up everyone says hallelujah, how weird.

'Pierrot le Fou' is something I keep coming back to. It's so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.

As much as I love Antonioni films, I love the Three Stooges.

On a Terrence Malick set, your thoughts are his voice. You think you're thinking, but actually he's thinking for you. He speaks to you, and he's the voice in your mind.

I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.