Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.
Interpretation
Creating enjoyable films is surprisingly challenging, highlighting a unique irony in filmmaking.
This quote by Steven Soderbergh reflects the paradoxical nature of filmmaking, where the aim of producing an entertaining film can often lead to greater complexity and difficulty. It suggests that despite the intentions of making something fun and enjoyable, the process involves significant challenges and artistic struggles that can make the outcome less than straightforward.
In practice
During a film festival discussion, I could use this quote to highlight the challenges directors face.
If you talk to any filmmaker, and if you said to them, 'I guarantee you x amount of money per month for the rest of your life, and it's not a big amount of money, but I can also guarantee that you will work continually, you will get to make what you want to make,' any filmmaker on the planet will make that kind of deal. I would have made it.
When people say that moviegoing is dead, I go, 'OK, so the makers of 'Get Out' should've sold that movie to a platform? Then they don't have this insane, crazy success theatrically all over the world.'
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.
Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.
A success, to me, is the ability to keep working. That's success. It has nothing to do with money; it's the ability to keep getting things made, period.
You don't go make 'Schizopolis' if you're trying to protect some idea of yourself as a filmmaker.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!
Don't write about Man; write about a man.
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice ... yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.
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