Provocative Storytelling Quotes

A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the occasional bar fight.

A film has to be like a stone in the shoe.

Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.

I do want to say things in these films. I want audiences to come out with shards stuck in them. I don't care if people love my films or walk out, as long as they have a strong response.

I don't make movies with the idea that people are going to walk out of them feeling comfortable or better about themselves or more secure in their own biases or opinions.

I like films that don't have that unonimity of a response; that don't have consensus in the audience. What it is essentially for me is that if you go back and watch the film a second time, do you feel that you've been played fair with? Are all the clues in place? Indeed, sometimes these things are even overstated. Specifically, for that reason.

People have said that my films are very difficult to watch, that they're experiences you are put through rather than ones you enjoy, and it's true.

Sex and writing live on playful cruelties.

I prefer to make a film that people have a really intense reaction to than have a film that people feel ambivalent about.

If I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know.

I usually don't mind movies that people think go overboard because that's what art is all about. Art is about pushing us and making us examine ourselves.

A film should be like a rock in the shoe.

A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.

Movies work, in my opinion, on the best level when they're more enigmatic, when we don't say it's this or that and where it raises more questions than answers.

It's like 60 Minutes on acid.

I loved working with [ Lars Von Trier], but I've done two films before, so I was quite used to him.He's a man of incredible moods of course, but he's also a hugely perceptive man, and there's no getting away from that. And he's able to put that perception into something like film, so we're very lucky.

When I'm in the process of making a movie I'm not thinking about the finished result, and whether people have to see it once or more than once, and what the reaction to it will be. I just make it, and then I live with the consequences, some of which may not be as pleasant as I'd like! I know one thing, however. Many viewers may come out of the theater not satisfied, but they won't be able to forget the movie. I know they'll be talking about it during their next dinner. I want them to be a little restless about my movies, and keep trying to find something in them.

[Fifty Shades Darker director] James Foley directed Fear. And that's what I love about this film, because it has a real sexy thriller element about it.

I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.

My feeling, however, is that films that are open are more productive for the audience. The films that, if I'm in a cinema, and I'm watching a movie that answers all the questions that it raises, it's a film that bores me. In the same way, if I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know.

Stories about sensitive issues like sex, drugs or sexual assault, suicide and teen drinking, are often censored because people just don't want to talk about those things. It's not that these things don't happen, but when they're shared in a fictional setting, for some reason they make some people uncomfortable.

The less lines, the better. I am the silent film actor, but not in a slapstick sort of way. Film is an image-based medium, so whatever you can say without the words is far more provocative and punctuating. If the lines are not funny or if they don't advance the story, sometimes it's hard. I hate talk in movies.

Would we even recognize an Oliver Stone production if it didn't kick up the usual fuss?