Steven Soderbergh Quotations | Page 2

I was thinking that people have to believe you're crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist. If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.

You can't change who you are, so I think that the only thing you can do is just never talk to people about stuff and then hope that maybe does something.

I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level.

I find myself in situations a lot where I have to say to someone, "This can be better," and it's hard to say that.

The traditional models for success are just also disappearing.

I recently decided that I'm not an originator. I'm a synthesist.

I want to form a political party that's based entirely on what music people listen to. To me, it's a much better barometer of what they think and feel than their political stance.

I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did.

I actually didn't find out about a lot of music until I was older. Some people have been listening to the Beatles their whole lives; I didn't discover them until I was 18 years old.

I feel I need to really think about whether there's a way to use what skill I have to address things that outrage me, like the 13 year old girl getting stoned to death. Because I don't think making a movie is going to help that, or change that.

I have a friend whose theory is that you're from wherever you went to high school. I think that's mostly true.

If you think that because you're Che, when you go into Bolivia, when people find out it's you, that they're going to have the same kind of reaction that the Cubans had to Castro, then you're high.

If you're not smart enough to know what Fidel meant during the Cuban revolution, that - when they were on the Granma - Fidel was already a rock star in Cuba, and how important that was to the indigenous population, then you're not paying attention.

There's definitely a way of thinking and a way of being in the South that has its advantages and disadvantages.

I'm not a snob. If I feel like there's a star that's the best person for that role, then that's who I get.

I grew up mostly in the South, and there's definitely something about the South that's different from the North. When people ask me where I'm from, I say Louisiana. I spent more years there than anywhere else.

Castro, without question, is one of the smartest politicians that's ever walked.

I can make a movie about Lee Harvey Oswald and make you feel what he feels and make you understand why he believes what he believes. That doesn't mean I think you should go out and shoot JFK.

A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it's really not about that. Or rather it's about feelings in the abstract.

I tend to be drawn more to people than pure story ideas.

If I'm a director and I read a script and I say yeah I really want to do this, I would never walk away because the deal wasn't very good - that I wasn't getting paid very much or that the chances that I would see anything on the back end were remote because of the financial waterfall and the way it's structured. I would never use that as a reason not to do something.

"A meteor hits planet Earth" - that's a story idea but that doesn't give me any indication of what the character is.

I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.

Surprisingly, I don't throw away that much. I don't move forward with a lot of things unless they're going somewhere. You also have to remember that when you're working with other artists, you have to be really careful about how you deal with that stuff.

Never had a cup of coffee in my life. Dr Pepper is my caffeine delivery system of choice.

I'm obviously really opinionated, but as a producer, you don't necessarily want the person you're working with to try to impress you - you want them to just be themselves.

I think that it's fear. The musicians themselves don't seem to know enough about why they're in the positions they're in, so they're afraid to lose those positions. If you're 22 years old and you can't believe you're even in the position to have a career making music, the first thing you're going to think is: Maintain. Don't lose it. And that's precisely what causes you to lose everything.

When I look around the world and think why is everything working or not working, it's because it's entrenched ideology. You can't solve a problem if you're sitting down with people who say, "All these ideas are off the table because of what I believe."

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative.The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

Once I had a potentially heart attack-inducing eight double espressos in one day. I think my assistant secretly swaps my coffees for decaf as she doesn't want me to die of caffeine overdose.

Any time I think out loud, 'I can't believe this is my job,' and remember I am a very lucky duck. Whether marshalling hundreds of zombies, doing crazy stunts or shooting big music numbers, I just feel fortunate to have made my passion my vocation.

The art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there.There's only the thing and what the thing needs to be.

When we look at what's going on in the world and we see the immense level of conflict that seems to always be happening - you can always trace it back to competing narratives.

My working life is me doing what I want to do. This is that. I've made movies that people don't go to see.

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.

I don't have any kind of ideology that precludes me from moving in one direction or another. I just want creative autonomy and I want at least an opportunity that it's going to be seen.

You got to deal with reviews the same way you deal with your views, which I a long time ago stopped reading because the point is if you believe the good ones you have to believe the bad ones. It's kind of all or nothing.

Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn't made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn't have been able to make the thing that they liked.

Everything is the director's fault - you can quote me on that. There are no excuses.

The brief flashbacks are sun-kissed, summery and optimistic. It's the only place in the movie you will see red, yellow, orange, or any vibrant colors.

That's why my attitude, even on my larger-scale movies, is to make them cheap. The less these things cost, the better for everybody.

Jude [Law] is really good at playing an obsessive. He has a very watchable quality when he's on a quest for something.

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but thats not reality, its just another aesthetic form of fiction.

I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.

It's become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen.

I like to make all kinds of movies. I'd do 'Ocean's Thirteen' with the right script.

I'm still very affected and moved by their music - maybe in a way that's different from someone who grew up around it.

In the land of ideas, you are always renting.

The best set was probably 'Bloody Sunday.' We had no money for extras and gambled on months of outreach to persuade the people of Derry to turn out and march for us on one single afternoon. And they did. In their tens of thousands. Seeing them march, their patience and their dignity and their commitment, I knew the movie would have a quality of truth.

A Movie That Costs Only $1.6 Million Doesn't Have to Be a Cultural Event to Turn a Profit.

A movie is something you see, cinema is something that’s made.

Never done an explosion, but I have had explosive diarrhea, and that was very, very real. Good thing I have my trailer.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

A real explosion is not only much more fun to shoot, it also helps the actors and creates an energy on set and ultimately in the scene.

I don't consider myself to be particularly gifted in the way that other filmmakers are gifted.

Sometimes I might feel like [a movie] is kind of a weird idea and if I'm going to get enough money to execute it properly I've got to get somebody in it that is going to justify the expense.

Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.

It's pretty clear to me that working as a director for hire agrees with me. I like it. The films that have come out of that, I personally like better than the ones that didn't.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative — I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

Truth and facts have to trump partisanship. There has to be something that's true regardless of what your angle is on it.

If you're going to make a movie for ten thousand you can talk everybody into doing it for free. You could make a really good-looking movie right for ten grand, if you have an idea.

I've begun to believe more and more that movies are all about transitions, that the key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes. And not just how you get from one scene to the next, but where you leave a scene and where you come into a new scene. Those are some of the most important decisions that you make. It can be the difference between a movie that works and a movie that doesn't.

I think there are only two times that I've ever ended up paying somebody their quote. Like what they actually were worth in the marketplace.

We have to have a version of our own story that we keep telling ourselves that allows us to get up in the morning. This version of yourself is what you sell to yourself. I think it necessarily includes ... not looking at certain things. Everybody's got some blind spot.

The key is, if youre not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.

People are sort of numb to watching violence, but sexual activity is still as strong as it ever was in terms of generating response.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

We're all standing on the shoulders of what other people have done. But you're supposed to take that and add your own sauce. It can be intimidating, believe me.

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.

We all get outraged by things and there are things that make us angry and maybe for a while we get angry enough to actually go do something about it.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

If you’re sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you’ll just become paralysed.