Jim Jarmusch
I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.Collection: Graduation
Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.Collection: Cool
If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.Collection: Poetry
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.Collection: Poetry
Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.
I didn't get the degree because in my last year, for my thesis film I made a feature called Permanent Vacation and they'd given me a scholarship, the Louis B Mayer fellowship and they made a mistake.
Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. It is. It is a very Zen-like game.
When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me.
I love rehearsing because in rehearsals there are no mistakes, nothing is wrong, some things apply or lead you to focus on the character and the things that don't apply are equally valuable because they lead you to towards what does.
I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.
Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.
What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.
A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.
Hopefully, if not it's not working right. I'm like a navigator and I try to encourage our collaboration and find the best way that will produce fruit. I like fruit. I like cherries, I like bananas.
I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.
I always think the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as very, very important because they stripped things down.
I didn't go to classes there, but ended up at the Cinematheque, and there it opened up even wider because there I saw a variety of films from all over the world.
I don't like American football. I think it's boring and ridiculous and predictable. But baseball is very beautiful. It's played on a diamond.
I have to tell everyone that when I finish a film and it goes out and is released, I never look at my films again. I don't like looking back. I don't even like talking about 'em! So I'm really digging back in my memory because I don't like to sit and look at my films again.
I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.
I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.
I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.
I started working with friends of mine and that, to some degree, continues.
I wanted to make an Indian character who wasn't either a) the savage that must be eliminated, the force of nature that's blocking the way for industrial progress, or b) the noble innocent that knows all and is another cliche. I wanted him to be a complicated human being.
I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.
I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there.
It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.
Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same.
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.Collection: Inspirational
The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.Collection: Events
If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.Collection: Way
It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.Collection: Baseball
My films are about the little things that happen between people that are sometimes far more valuable and insightful than the big dramatic things that happen.Collection: People
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.Collection: Inspiration
Each one of us is a set of shifting molecules, spinning in ecstasy.Collection: Molecules
When I get depressed, or anything, I go 'think of all the music I haven't even heard yet!' So, it's the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?Collection: Gun
Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?Collection: Plot
I like marginal characters, I like real people. I learn more from talking to my plumber when he comes to fix my toilet than I do from meeting a movie star. I think my movies are in the same vein as that.Collection: Stars
To me, everything is endless variations on other things. Like waves in the ocean. They continue to turn over on each other, and they're all slightly different. I don't know if originality is possible. Is it even necessary? Because everything is different than what came before, but it's all branches from the same tree. Originality is overrated, but what you do with things is always different.Collection: Ocean
I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.Collection: Veins
It's a sad and beautiful world.Collection: Beautiful
The beauty of a movie is that you walk in, you don't know anything about it, you enter a world that's new to you, and that's the magic of being transported.Collection: Magic
Music, to me, is the most beautiful form, and I love film because film is very related to music. It moves by you in its own rhythm. It's not like reading a book or looking at a painting. It gives you its own time frame, like music, so they are very connected for me. But music to me is the biggest inspiration. When I get depressed, or anything, I go "think of all the music I haven't even heard yet!" So, it's the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?Collection: Beautiful
I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.Collection: Thinking
I love silent films. The future is unwritten.Collection: Silent Films
The beauty of ideas is that they are like waves in the ocean and they connect with things that came before them, and I think it is very important to embrace things that interest you and influence you, and incorporate them into what you do, as all artists have always done. The ones that say they don’t, are lying. Or are afraid that their work won’t be seen as being original, somehow.Collection: Lying
I think of myself as an amateur filmmaker, not a professional, in the sense that "amateur" means love of something, for the form.Collection: Mean
Music just gives me so much energy and inspiration. Music and literature in a way probably influence me more than cinema does because they're different forms and yet related. I probably know as much about music history as I do about the history of cinema.Collection: Inspiration
One of our favorite Joe Strummer quotes was, "No input, no output." Meaning, we're going to hear a band, we're going to go to a museum, or we're going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We're going to get some input, because if we don't, then we have nothing. It's a circle. It's a respiratory thing.Collection: Admire