Derek Cianfrance Quotes

To me, discomfort is a gift in the films that I’m making.

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.

As a writer, I always peel back the layers, go to the most sensitive places uncomfortably close to the heart.

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.

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.

The only time I judge an actor on set is if they’re not failing; if they get it right all the time, I start to question it. I feel like it’s too easy.

I have kids. I can’t hardly watch an afternoon football game with them without having to turn off the TV during the commercials. It’s too much. I don’t know when violence was deemed such a cinematic thing.

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.

If you make a movie that’s close to your heart, it will be close to other people’s.

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.

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.

In terms of Ray Liotta, when I was a teenager growing up in Colorado, I didn’t have pictures of girls on my wall. I had pictures of Ray Liotta on my wall. Along with Mike Patton, he was one of my heroes.

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.

I love actors that are brave, that are courageous. And courage to me is not the absence of fear, it’s the presence of fear, and they go to places that really scare them, because as an audience, that’s where you feel danger.

I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone‘s scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that’s how I write.

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.

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 shot ‘Blue Valentine‘ on 16mm for the past, and for the present on the Red Camera. I feel that both formats are valid. The stories should dictate the format we shoot on. Filmmakers should have a choice.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I ask all my actors to do two things: I ask them to fail for me, and I ask them to surprise me.

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 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.

I’m trying to be the coach. My actors are my players. They’re doing things that I’m too cowardly to do myself.

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.

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.