Movies, they take years of my life, so I'm fortunate that I get to work in a lot of different mediums.
If you focus your energy on the camera, it takes away from the time you have to focus on the performances.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Focusing too much on technical aspects can detract from the quality of the creative performance.
This quote by Spike Jonze emphasizes that when one becomes overly concentrated on technical details, such as how the camera is set up, it can lead to a loss of attention on what truly matters: the artistic performance itself. In the realm of filmmaking and creativity, it's important to balance technical proficiency with the essence of storytelling and emotional engagement, ensuring that art remains the focal point rather than the tools used to create it.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a film class, when discussing the importance of artistic expression over technical details, this quote can illustrate a key point.
More from Spike Jonze
All quotes →If you compromise what you're trying to do just a little bit, you'll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you're suddenly really far away from where you're trying to go.
Whenever I start writing, I try to put together songs that feed the feeling of the movie.
I want to make films without a single clear message, and films that are as close as possible to what it feels like to be alive. At least to me.
I think if something's emotionally real - and I'm not even talking about in movies or in art, but in life - you can't really argue with that, even if your intellectual mind might know differently.
When I'm making stuff, the thing that excites me most is not the result, but the process and trying to do something I've never done before.
Similar quotes
There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it’s degrading our music, not improving it It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art. The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.
And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.