For a found-footage-style movie, there’s a definite advantage in using unknowns, because it helps sell the illusion that it’s real. A known actor would get in the way of the suspension of disbelief.
When I wrote ‘Grand Illusion,’ I was making it up as we went along. I wrote this stuff and tried to do the best job I could.
Television shows, especially hour-longs, are hard, tiring work. Those people are very tired and very rich. But they’re working really hard, and to create the illusion of having the time of your life like that, you really got to give it up to the people who do it.
The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn’t exist in the present here and now.
Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.
The trust of the mass population can no longer be taken for granted, and any continuation of the ‘grand illusion’ is dangerous for leaders in today’s world.
The problem is, when you’re making an animated movie, the studio has an illusion in their minds – and it’s really not true – that because it’s a drawing, it can be changed at any time.
I’m not under any illusion that I’m an A-lister; I don’t think I’m even on the alphabet scale. But I’m in people’s houses every day – I’m there when they wake up and there when they go to bed. So people think they know who I am. And, to a certain extent, they do.
I tend to curve my back or pop my hip on the side. I always like to turn a little bit profile, and if you put one of your knees in, it also gives the illusion of more curves. There are a lot of tricks – you learn on the job sometimes.
When totalitarian regimes are established, they at least have the illusion of the single-minded purpose. But once they establish the stature that’s necessary for a totalitarian regime, they tend to flail.
I like creating the illusion that suddenly I’ve just done five things at once.
The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture.
People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it’s only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.
The source of all the material comes from nothingness, illusion is working more on things you can prove. That’s the principle, the essence of life, it is actually an illusion, not immaterial. That’s worth pursuing. So illusion is not nothing. In a way, that is the truth.
Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be – like the reality of yesterday – an illusion tomorrow.
Because of the way I am built I photograph taller than I actually am; it’s an optical illusion. The way you’re naturally built is not something you can fake – you either photograph taller or you don’t.
There is no ‘I.’ That’s an illusion we’ve got to get beyond.
All politics to me – Indian or white – is an illusion preventing us from being authentic because we’re communicating through something that isn’t real to us.
During the war, women without nylons drew lines up the backs of their legs to give the illusion of silk stockings. Painting over grey hair with spray-on root touch-up – or even dark eyeshadow – is the Covid-19 equivalent.
Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.
A woman should be an illusion.
The Keynesian prescription for unemployment rests on the persistence of a ‘money illusion’ among workers, i.e., on the belief that while, through unions and government, they will keep money wage rates from falling, they will also accept a fall in real wage rates via higher prices.
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn’t -it’s human.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
At the end of the day, the sovereignty of maleness is an illusion. In essence and in origin, we are all entirely female.
The overall concept of ‘Only You’ is a reflection on the illusion of love, how we confront, understand and manifest our self identities within relationships.
I formulated the theme behind ‘The Grand Illusion’ album after observing how American culture creates illusions through advertising and entertainment to convince us that our lives our lacking, in order to sell products.
This illusion that a lower class has less intelligence than a higher class is a complete fake-out.
We’re nondenominational. I come from Northern Ireland, and we’ve had religious wars for years. I didn’t want to create an illusion that my God is better than your God. So our show is a spiritual show, not a religious show.
I’m not even aware of my success. Success is such an illusion.
The illusion when things are going your way is that it’s gonna just keep going. But it never does.
We’re all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.
The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time. We can’t even comprehend it. It’s such an illusion, it’s such a strange thing.
I don’t really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.
I’ve never been under the illusion that everybody on death row is innocent – far from it. My own guess is upwards of 90 percent are guilty. But a ten percent error rate if that’s what it is, or even five percent, is really way too high.
There are some great actors I don’t want to meet because I don’t want to know how they did it. I don’t want to know anything about their personal life, and the illusion, or whatever it is, the shape-shiftery magic stuff that they do, which is my joy.
It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
The top end are still making bucket loads while maintaining the illusion of the American dream: that if you work hard enough, you can make a fortune. Meanwhile, the working and middle classes have been hollowed out of the system.
Do not be misled by what you see around you, or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideals. But you are not part of that world.
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.
Workplace romances – or even the illusion of a workplace romance – can carry many ramifications and consequences.
The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
I’m not under too much of an illusion of how smart or un-smart I am because filmmaking ultimately is about teamwork.
I harbor no illusion that government and elected office is a panacea for all of society’s ills.
I believe in everything. I believe that everything is an illusion, and everything is there to be believed in.
After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.
Sometimes my art is just an illusion – or is it?
Meta-fiction doesn’t depend on the illusion that you’re reading about real people.
The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.
We have an illusion of security, we don’t have security.
Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.
I think of makeup as more like a design, decoration, or jewelry. I mean, it’s literally paint; it’s art. I don’t prefer to use it as concealing anything because it influences the illusion of standardized perfection.
It’s all kind of a big illusion: the white picket fence and the perfect marriage and the kids. Check that box off, check that box off, and move forward.
A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.
The Oriental thinks everything in the sense-perceptible world is ‘maya’; everything perceived by our senses and all thinking connected with sense perceptions is ‘maya,’ the great illusion. The only reality is the reality of the soul. What a human being achieves in his or her soul is reality.
Often, I feel like a cheap imitation aesthetically looks better to me than the real, out-of-reach thing. It’s amazing that brands create a whole illusion of exclusivity and luxury, and then you can go get the $5 version of a $30,000 thing and feel the same way but have a cool little secret.
