Top 35 Derek Cianfrance Quotes

There’s something so great when you‘re watching a movie when you slowly get to know somebody more, because it’s like a real relationship.

I don’t have a life, really. I take my kids to school, and I go home, and I write. Then I go pick my kids up, make them dinner, put them to bed, and write some more.

From making documentaries all these years, it doesn’t feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I’m always trying to shoot as though it’s really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I’m going to be following. I want to follow them.

When I was a kid, I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war, and the other was that my parents would get a divorce; and when I was twenty, they split up, and I just felt like I needed to confront all those things that scared me as a kid – entering young adulthood and trying to have relationships.

Look, pain is there in the world, and there’s catharsis through that. I feel like there’s… a rapture, if we can get through it, if we can confront things.

After ‘Place Beyond the Pines,’ honestly, I was sick of myself. Sick of my own ideas. I wanted to do an adaptation, but everything I’d been reading, I just didn’t understand it.

My older brother gave me a cassette tape of Mr. Bungle, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. I used to drive around Colorado in a Mustang II – it was when they got away from the muscle-car Mustangs, so it was sort of old lady. I couldn’t go above 45 mph in that car, but I would drive around listening to Mr. Bungle.

There’s this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I’ve never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I’m certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We’re human beings.

I’m not asking actors to act. I’m asking them to behave. I want to see their being, not how they can fake it.

When I grew up, a director was Cecil B DeMille, a guy sitting down with a megaphone speaking. He was the voice of God, the image of God. When I went to start making docs, I quickly turned the megaphone to my ear not to my mouth. It’s more about funneling in the words and listening as doc filmmaker.

I don’t really collect anything. I grew up in a family that collected things, and then they’d get sick, and people die, and then they have their basements full of stuff that goes from one box to the next, so I try not to get sentimental with stuff. I just try to collect memories; I guess that would be it.

Lars Ulrich, he was my hero growing up. I wanted to be like him. I played the drums.

When we make these movies, you sign up for an experience. It’s not just, ‘Action! Cut!’ There’s not that safety in it. It’s kind of a dangerous place to be. I mean, it is safe, but it gets personal. It’s no longer about saying the lines. It’s about really having an experience.

I was an audience member before I’m a filmmaker. All I’ve tried to do as a filmmaker was to make movies I want to see.

There’s something so glorious in giving control to the world. I think that’s what I’m trying to do in my films – control the world but also let it be chaotic, let there be life.

Every moment is, in some ways, eternal. Once you put something into the world, it stays there.

I was a member of the VHS generation. I used to study movies as a kid because I had a VCR and could record a movie on HBO and just watch it repeatedly.

Right now, I think I have time to be three things, in no particular order: a father, a husband, and a filmmaker. That’s why I don’t go out – I have no space for it. I feel like one of those main things would suffer.

I feel like the job of an artist is to confront their own darkness and their own demons and fears. And I want to make movies that feel human up on the screen. I don’t really relate to dudes wearing spandex and capes.

When I cast someone in a movie, I have to absolutely trust who they are as a human being. Trust is the intangible of moviemaking.

I love people that work with passion and love. When you make choices that way, there’s reverberations, consequences. That’s what I’m interested in, that echo, that ripple of choice.

As a parent myself, I can appreciate the MPAA and what they’re supposed to do, but what happens with NC-17 is that the MPAA is basically taking away the rights of parents. They’re basically telling me that I can’t show my kids this movie if I decide they can see it.

I think book adaptations, the best one to me is like ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ Which is a short story, 21 pages, that expands so beautifully into a movie.

One of the bad things about being a filmmaker, about being me, is I can hardly read a book anymore because every time I read something, I have a poaching mentality, like, ‘Oh, can this be a movie?’

I grew up Catholic, so I feel guilty about everything.

I think ‘GoodFellas’ is just a perfect film. From an efficiency of storytelling standpoint, from an entertainment standpoint, from a performance standpoint, from a use of music standpoint, from a cinematography and editing standpoint – to me, it’s just a perfect movie.

It’s like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life and just watch them swim. That’s what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.

We had all these smiley family pictures all over the walls of my house, but I always found those pictures to be odd because we weren’t smiling all the time. I don’t want to paint the picture of a total dysfunctional house, but there were a lot of arguments in that house. A lot of pain.

There’s one rule that I have on my movies, which is that anything that you want to do, you can do. But! There’s a flip side to that, which is that anything I want you to do, give it a try also.

I don’t think we ever know 100 percent of a person, even ourselves, but I think in families, you get closer to people’s secrets and people’s darkness – and their light, the full contrast of a person.

I’ve always thought that guns are a cowardly tool in the hands of men and women trying to solve problems with each other. And cowardly in the hands of filmmakers. It’s taken so lightly in films.

One reason Cassavetes is a hero to me is that his movies grew with him; they reflected the stages of his life. He made movies about where he was at that time. That’s what I want to do with my films.

I’m not the greatest reader. I feel like I have a bit of dyslexia or something, and that’s probably why I became a filmmaker. I have the need to communicate, the need to tell stories; and the need to understand stories led me to movies.

I think people need fantasy, but I think they also need to know that they’re not being lied to. I think sometimes the fantasy can betray people and become more difficult for people’s lives than just truth. I can’t stand delusion. Delusion makes me sick.

With each character in a movie, I’m looking for a human being. I’m looking for a person. And to me, I’m looking for a person that’s full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that’s full of successes and failures, a person that’s full of joy and sorrow. I’m interested in people that are human beings that are alive.