Steven Soderbergh Quotes

You can make a thousand different movies about the same subject.

I use colors to bring fine points of story and character.

Always when you are doing films, the themes swallow you in one way or another.

When I think about how I want to reach an audience, I just wanted to make pieces that were inspired by something that gave me so much pleasure.

Every movie has its uniqueness. You just do your best and go with it.

I have always been interested in having people fall into the image and be aware of their reaction first, and then think about the style.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.

It takes more drawing to tell a story in pantomime.

There's something that comes into you that's so exciting when you're directing.

I've done a lot of ad films where an idea can be translated in 30 or 40 seconds. But in a movie, an idea needs to be stretched for two hours, and requires you to draw a bit from your experiences in life.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

For the collection, I am like a painter or a writer. I may or may not be a character in my own story.

You can make up your own story when you look at a photo.

Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.

In movies, storytelling and every single art form, we're creating wonder. You're starting with a blank page and creating something that doesn't exist.

I have a feeling that in art the need to understand and the need to communicate are one.

Reading something for the first time and getting this feeling like the material provokes you on some level, and doing the movie is really just sort of defining and figuring out why exactly you felt certain things when you read it.

It is only when memory is filtered through imagination that the films we make will have real depth.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

I don't tend to work directly from life, except in trying to mimic or match the outlines of its insanity. In other words, when I live through something, I just try to say to myself, "OK, remember this - life is really this crazy or scary or beautiful or surprising - so try to 'get at' that in your stories.

I love writing, but I stopped because I felt I was more effective approaching filmmaking from a different vantage point.

The level of control, that's part of what's so appealing about filmmaking - you have so much control over what the reader, the viewer, is noticing from moment to moment. They can't do that boring boring boring thing as easily.

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

There's a responsibility to the story, but there's also the sense of fun you have. When everybody else leaves, you get to continue to create. For me, there's no other way! I really like creating from the ground up.