I don't know what's funny and what's not so I test out all of my material in front of audiences.
I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it.
Also everyone's hearts are in the right place when you do a small movie. You're not doing it for the money; you're not doing it for the possibility of an Oscar nomination. You are doing it because you love the material.
Among the wealthy, compassionate men claim the richest wealth, For material wealth is possessed by even contemptible men. Find and follow the good path and be ruled by compassion. For if the various ways are examined, compassion will prove the means to liberation.
I get to the point where I feel relaxed, and then I just shoot a ton of material and make a lot of different choices.
A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.
Like a researcher in his laboratory, I am the first spectator of the suggestions drawn from the materials. I unleash their expressive possibilities, even if I do not have a very clear idea of what I am going to do. As I go along with my work I formulate my thought, and from this struggle between what I want and the reality of the material - from this tension - is born an equilibrium.
Just listen to the material. What is it going to say? Just wait. Probably the material will tell you something.
Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.
Homicide is the best material I've had the chance to do.
But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.
Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.
And for me there's still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.
I know quickly whether a guy is boyfriend material. If I can have a good time doing absolutely nothing with him, then that's boyfriend material for me. Like if we're able to have fun at a gas station. I've had some really good times at gas stations.
I've never tried to make a movie to pay an overhead. We're in a very creative business, and I want to make movies because I enjoy that movie or that material.
I see young people being dismissed for supposedly wanting only "stupid" and "easy" material, or that they don't have an attention span longer than three minutes. I disagree with all those statements; I just think they aren't true. I'm saying that our generation wants stuff that is substantial and challenging, as well as thoughtful and endearing. Well, I don't know if I'm doing that, but I'm trying.
The films you're making have to be faithful to the material.
Possibly the Creator did not make the world chiefly for the purpose of providing studies for gifted novelists; but if He had done so, we can scarcely imagine that He could have offered anything much better in the way of material.
The process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material.
Now, you believe you are a material person dabbling with. But essentially, you are a spiritual being dabbling with the material world means you have started seeing life with utmost clarity. There are no more illusions about it. You see everything just the way it is.