Travis Knight Quotes

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

The whole thing with animated movies is that it's very hard to get out of your head because it's very moving through each line systematically.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

I guess I have a fascination with the idea of puppeteering. I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do.

The greatest thing that you have when you're a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.

I don't want to do a history lesson. I don't think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.

I have always wanted to do a feature film that brings the world of Lisa Frank to life. We have so much backstory on our characters, and they have been alive in my imagination since the beginning.

I believe, even when I'm doing my standup or my acting or whatever I'm doing, I believe in painting pictures.

Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests.

I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

It's amazing what you can do without in terms of filmmaking when a story is really important.

I think journalists and filmmakers are keen observers. And actors must also be sharp observers as they draw their characters and their stories from what they experience around them. After all, that is what actors, filmmakers, journalists are trained to be: observers. And then they do something with their observations.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

It's only the filmmaker. The script is really, really second. And there's a huge gap between filmmaker and script for me. I almost don't care about the story that they're telling; I really only care about who wants to tell it.

I joke that I learned the essentials of storytelling from Hanna-Barbera, but I pretty much did. That kind of television is what enamored me as a kid, and that's what really got me hooked. You could say that's where it all began.

If I had to choose criteria, for me, it's about first the director. I want to be a part of something that's good and intellectually challenging. After the director it's the character and the story. That's the deal for me.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.

Movies aren't just supposed to be a representation of reality. They're supposed to be an art.

Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don't want to go.