You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.
Interpretation
The impact of a film goes beyond its creation; it is shaped by the individual interpretations of its audience.
This quote emphasizes that the true essence of a film is not solely defined by the editing process or the director's vision, but rather by the way it resonates with and is interpreted by each viewer. Every person's unique perspective contributes to a diverse array of meanings, making the experience of watching a film a collaborative and personal journey that varies from one individual to another.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of films on audiences after a screening event.
If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.
I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.
We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.
People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
Words are like gems to me... imagine yourself walking through a very shallow stream and picking up beautiful stones that catch your eye... that's what names are like for me.
I've played guitar in so many different styles, and I want to revisit them all.
And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart
Music washes away the dust of every day life.
Most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they'll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they've owned a guitar for 20 years.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.