Aesthetic Coherence Quotes

In the evolution of the [The Hunger Games] movie, Gary [Ross] and I talked a lot about tonal bandwidth and making sure that the look and feel and style and choices of the movie stayed within a certain consistent bandwidth.

It's so hard to do fittings [for Yeezy] because we want to do things that are inspiring, that people could look at and say, "Wow, I like that color palette, I could put that together." And there are so many images of things that it's almost impossible to have your clothes go up against the amount you're seeing and carry it into one language.

To achieve vital harmony in a picture it must be constructed out of parts in themselves incomplete, brought into harmony only at the last stroke.

Having done Spaced, I can't even remember it being that difficult on Spaced, but we know what the end's going to be like. We know why we're putting in this amount of work, or why a shot might be particularly tricky, because we know that what we do is create a whole package. It's the writing, the performances, and the style of camerawork, that's what we're working toward, and we're prepared for that.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge; each line adds strength and takes none away... Making lines run into each other is not composition. There must be motive for the connection. Get the art of controlling the observer – that is composition.

In a successful painting everything is integral - all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness.

Lofty designs must close in like effects.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

Once we establish an architectural style in each park, we stick with it religiously and comprehensively so that it comes out as a gestalt.

To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, and Community)

What I love about directing is finding common ground in complementary palate with wardrobe, set design, the camera department, the makeup department, et cetera. I love figuring out that synergy. To have everything work in concert is amazing, I love working with that kind of logic. Directing is a cavalcade of taste decisions - this one or that one, but I raather enjoy it and am in the process of setting up the next endeavor.

A precision of composition and figuration is what I'm working toward. I've always felt viewers should have an experience without having to ask what the hell is was about.

In other words, each piece of the building must look as though it was designed for that particular building.

I don't think there's any single finished point for a work. It's done when something's happening with the work that feels like a balanced, coherent disharmony. That's one way to say it. And where if I keep working on it, to discover and struggle with new problems, I'll obliterate the ones I was working on. I could keep working on it, but it'd become something different. And I value what's here, at the moment.