film themes Quotes

There's no such thing as an anti-war film.

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.

I make films about working class people. All my films have always been about that. For example, the brothel is a workplace. It's aberrant, but a workplace nonetheless. I was more interested as opposed to glamorizing and saying, oh, this is a great erotic place, it's a place of business. The commodity is sex.

I think if you look at the themes that are presented in the film, some are inherently social, and I think that any film which deals with the family is dealing with the smallest social unit in our society - and in a sense it is a question of scope.

I think Ang Lee is a very, very talented director. He used martial arts to talk about love and girl, you know... But Zhang Yimou tried to use martial arts film to talk about Chinese culture, Chinese people. What do they think, what do they want and what do they hope the world will become.

My whole life has been a very communal experience; growing up in a house full of happy hippies, having dinner parties three days a week, and going to Christiania, I was constantly surrounded by people celebrating community. If you look at the films I've done, they all share that theme.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

'Into The Wild' had a great sense of wild, unpredictable freedom that I loved, and 'Unforgiven' is just a great western with characters that walked the line between right/wrong with an ambiguity that felt very true to frontier life.

I think there are few films out there that take motherhood seriously.

My films have a lot of historical context; I'm a huge fan of ruins. You see a lot of ruin work in my movies, I like ruins.

So far I've done two films that have basically been about television because I know that world.

Once, a French journalist told me that all my films are the same. I said, 'Excuse me? I work hard to make them different.' What she meant was that in my films there is a character that faces insurmountable odds, and they overcome them. But I thought that might be true, but you need certain factors for drama, and you need to overcome them.

All my films are statements, especially when I write them.

When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays.

Sam Peckinpah's movies probably say more about him than anybody's body of work says about that person. There are running themes in his films that I find eminently fascinating, disturbing, exhausting, and exhilarating.

I don't know if I'm the most religious guy, but I think I'm a spiritual man, and these are the things I think about a lot. In terms of the film, I think 'The Grey' is very much a non-denominational kind of film. I don't think it's something that relies on a particular religious bent to tell the story.

I've never had to search for themes. My films just come naturally out of my interest.

The single difference between films for children and films for adults is that in films for children, there is always the option to start again, to create a new beginning. In films for adults, there are no ways to change things. What happened, happened.

If a film is about love, it tends to be about tortured love or discovering love or young love. It's not this wonderful kind of comfortable, old resilient love.

My first few films were institutional comedies, and you're on pretty safe ground when you're dealing with an institution that vast numbers of people have experienced: college, summer camp, the military, the country club.

'District 9' was a singular anti-Apartheid metaphor, and 'Elysium' is a more general metaphor about immigration and how the First World and Third World meet. But the thing that I like the most about the metaphor is that it can be scaled to suit almost any scenario.

The thing that interested me, there are so many filmmakers I admire - like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino - they have these themes where there's not much going on, but they were suspenseful.

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

Mental violence is as bad as physical violence. You don't see that very often in movies, so it was a good subject to tackle.

The core of the film [Hunt for the Wilderpeople] is that relationship. Whether they're getting on or whether they're not. If that relationship works, then everything else works as well. And you kind of almost, sort of, gives into a realm of something like New Zealand magic realism... There is no world in which social work is actually pursues some kid into the woods in this manner.