After a few days with the iPhone X, I can begin to make out its themes. It’s a step towards fading the actual physical manifestation of technology into a mist where it’s just there – a phone that’s ‘all screen,’ one that turns on simply by seeing you, one that removes the mechanics of buttons and charging cables.
Mr. Trump’s election has caused a tectonic shift in advertising – just as it has in media more generally – and themes that might have once seemed innocuous or patriotic have suddenly become politically charged, controversial, and divisive.
It’s always relevant – moving forward into the future and finding out who you are. I think those themes never get stale.
Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.
I think books with spiritual themes simply point to the deeper mysteries of life – to what lies beyond us, to what’s hidden inside of us, or perhaps to an understanding of what truly matters.
In film, in general, you have just so many cliche themes or stories that are told over and over again.
Lyrically I like to use themes that make the listener use his or her imagination, and to give a little of the lessons I’ve learned in my own life.
There’s so many more themes of drag than just fierceness.
The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!
When I wrote the lyrics, melodies, and the first themes of ‘Serendipity,’ I tried to come up with some rare things you find in life, something very special, like the calico, three-striped cat; things that have extraordinary meanings in people’s lives.
‘Nowhere Man’ embodies one of my favorite themes – the hero completely out of his element. It’s really near and dear to my heart.
From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don’t write political plays.
People like scary stories. There’s a fascination with fear themes, and we want to face those things in a weird, subconscious way.
I think as the largest democracy in the world, we have self-conscious filmmakers who can handle sensitive themes.
Because kids are physically smaller, there’s an assumption by people who haven’t read a kids’ book for a long time that their ideas and themes and problems and ambitions must be commensurately smaller and less important. I would venture that sometimes the opposite is true.
Sam Peckinpah’s movies probably say more about him than anybody’s body of work says about that person. There are running themes in his films that I find eminently fascinating, disturbing, exhausting, and exhilarating.
I like to put my characters through a lot, so, in ‘Talon,’ my fans will find familiar themes of bravery and sacrifice, and what it means to be human… even if you’re not human.
I had worked for George Bush as a speechwriter, and I read a lot of White House memoirs. They all have two themes: ‘It Wasn’t My Fault’ and ‘It Would Have Been Much Worse if I Hadn’t Been There.’
My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.
As I was finding my musical style, I found my personal style as well, and moving from Germany to L.A. was part of that, raiding the secondhand stores in L.A. trying out different beauty themes, finding my love for huge lashes and big, long hair extensions.
I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.
In ‘Ratatouille,’ there are two different themes that express the two sides of Remy’s personality: the creative side: the chef, and the ‘thief’ side: his nature as a mouse.
There is more to Indian cinema than just Bollywood. I think regional cinema, especially Tamil and Marathi cinema, are exploring some really bold themes.
The whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art.
French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.
What I think of as ‘freakonomics’ is mostly storytelling around an idea – not a theme but an idea. I like ideas much more than themes. Themes are boring. Themes are, ‘Wool is back,’ but ideas are, ‘Why is wool back?’
The media thinks that you have to make science sexy and concentrate on themes such as rivalry and the human issues.
The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it’s not all about characters, relationships and themes, it’s also about place and the poetry of place. It’s about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.
Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign touched on all the themes I have covered throughout my career and all of the layers of meaning that run through black politics. Ambition. Aspiration. Fear. Folly. It was all on display as Obama boarded the roller coaster that ultimately led to the White House.
I’m always thinking about time. That’s one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people’s everyday lives.
I can’t make a movie unless I believe in the themes behind it. I mean, that’s the first question I ask myself, always, is, ‘What is this movie about?’
I’ve never had to search for themes. My films just come naturally out of my interest.
One of the big themes – if not the big theme – of ‘Mockingjay – Part 1’ is the battle of the airwaves. I don’t think teenagers really understand the role propaganda has in our lives in terms of politics, advertising, and the general manipulation of imagery.
There are resurrection themes in every society that has ever been studied, and it is because not just only do we fantasize about the possibility of resurrection and recovery, but it actually happens. And it happens a lot.
I was the Playmate editor for ‘Playboy’ for two years. I produced two years’ worth of centerfolds. I did everything on that, from picking the girls to designing the sets to picking the wardrobe, coming up with themes, assigning the photographer, down to editing the photos and approving the retouching.
But I’m a fairly mechanical worker – I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it’s moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?
There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive – in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen.
‘A Perfect Place’ is character-driven. The director for that wanted a couple of identifiable themes with a bunch of variations. That is what I did. The director for ‘The Solitude of Prime Numbers’ did not want that at all.
In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music – an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.
When I started, I was 18 and really into punk rock and just wanted the action. Over the years, I’ve gravitated towards the travel and experience around surfing and trying to relay that feeling. Going forward, I’m interested in story-driven and personality-driven themes.
Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life.
I believe the biggest themes of life are put into the best focus when held up against the very sharp light of mortality.
As a singer, I like to treat my fans with great content and keep it fresh by experimenting with different genres or themes.
I love Narcy, he’s such a good artist. I know him personally, he’s a friend. He’s of my generation – he puts out a lot of stuff through music that are themes I like to hit on in my writing and comedy.
I think that one of the reasons Shakespeare withstands the test of time is that his themes are so universal.
It’s true that misunderstanding and lack of understanding are often themes in my fiction, but I am grateful for the moments when true understanding is achieved, especially between writer and reader. It’s miraculous.
I wanted to get back to my style of 20 years ago after a long period of exploring horror and fantasy themes.
I think a melody is a melody. And the way I usually start is I start writing my themes without even writing to picture to just try to find the tone for the movie or the TV show.
