Creative Approach Quotes

Filming, for me, is a way of approaching, little by little - of getting closer and closer to my subject. And that subject itself can transform, or it can remain the same.

Content is now the most import factor that decides a film's success at the box office, so we as filmmakers are all trying different stories.

A lot of the math that I do, it's not sort of premeditated. I talk online or with a colleague, and I get interested, and I just follow where it leads.

I've tried to create a comedy that doesn't look like any other comedy. Maybe traditionally in TV there has been a kind of formula that says, 'Oh, comedy has to look this way; it has to look super bright.' But the way we shoot 'Insecure' is motivated by the mental state of each of our characters.

Hollywood looks backwards and tries to repeat. And we really try not to do that. We don't always succeed, but I really think that what we try and do is different.

Every cinematographer I worked with had his own way of solving problems.

I have a visual sense for the music. It has to stay true to a certain sense of period. I rely on a sense of colors and mood in my approach to the arrangement.

Steve Vai had a unique style of playing. Steve Vai didn't sound like anyone else: Steve Vai sounded like Steve Vai.

Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don’t actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn’t the object?

Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

Our Holy Father... is very clear that, of course, the teachings of the Church must be preserved and passed on. However, we need to do this in a way that the Holy Father says is creative. We need to do it in a way that we look for new strategies that address the hearts of people.

I don't take on big things. What I do, pretty much, is make the big things small and the small things big.

That's the thing with me being a former athlete: in the way I attack characters and attack poetry is from the base of being an athlete.

I saw that something changed in terms of the way I approach writing. I don't know. Before, everything was just sort of pieced together; and more and more nowadays I'll have complete songs - chords, lyrics, a melody - and we'll apply to those songs what we feel is required. That has happened much more on Humbug album than on any of the others.

I have never won big fights just doing one thing, being one-dimensional.

Successful entrepreneurs may hate hierarchies and structures and try to destroy them. They may garner the disapproval of MBAs for their creativity and wildness. But they have antennae in their heads. When they walk down the street anywhere in the world, they have their antennae out, evaluating how what they see can relate back to what they are doing. It might be packaging, a word, a poem, or even something in a completely different business.

I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way.

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

I always want to approach records from where it feels very graspable. You know what the song's about, but it's presented to you in a way that's like, 'I never heard something like this before,' but it doesn't push you away.

If I'm ever working on a set and anyone talks about a master shot, I say there is no master shot. Before I even went to film school, I learned about movies by being in a British feature film, where everything was shot master shot, mid-shot, close-up. But I reject the idea of a master shot. You don't shoot everything mechanically; you find imaginative ways that serve the action.

Making the complicated simple is true creativity.

Bob Wallace was my editor at Rolling Stone when I first started writing there, and he's a wonderful editor. I was in the Philippines during the Marcos overthrow, and I was up on what was called Smokey Mountain. I think it's gone now, but it was a garbage dump with a bunch of people living on it. I was talking to Bob on the phone, and I told him, "I'm a humorist. I can't write about this." And Bob told me to let my style be dictated by the subject, to take what I saw and write about it in the tone that it requires.

I always try to approach things from the point of authenticity. I've done that for my short films, working with non-actors from the real environments where you go exploring and placing them into the cast alongside professional actors.

I like telling stories with a sense of humor. But humor can also distance you from the subject you're writing about. I'm interested in using humor as a portal to something a bit more serious.

I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar.