Words matter. These are the best Riley Stearns Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When everyone decides that they have to be a certain way, that there’s one way to be a man and one way to be a woman, that’s when we go down the wrong path.
Sometimes I wonder how my filmmaking would have been affected by film school but in the end I’m glad I got to figure it out on my own.
I go back home for Christmas every year. Inevitably, somebody from my family will say, ‘How’s the karate going?’ I’ve told them a million times I do jiu-jitsu, but it’s always, ‘This is Riley. He does karate.’ They’re very different art forms!
Jujitsu helped me a lot in feeling more comfortable with who I was.
‘Faults,’ in a lot of ways, is still is a heightened film, but the end of the day, it’s the real world. It’s in ’86, is the arbitrary date that I’ve set. And so I went about it in a more realistic way.
To think that there’s one version of a man is ridiculous.
My perspective is a white man’s perspective and nothing else. I can’t speak for anyone else or say something I’m not versed in.
I was questioning what it means to be a man. I didn’t feel as masculine as I thought I should. I was out of shape, slightly depressed, inactive, and didn’t feel like I belonged to something. I started thinking about what the definition of a man is, and realized they’re all these archaic tropes.
I went to UT in Austin for a year as an undeclared liberal arts student. After that year I applied to the film program but didn’t get in so I dropped out and moved out to L.A.
I have always been fascinated by cults and mind control, and specifically deprogramming from the cult.
I would say the biggest challenge on any film is always time.
I play bass, and I wanted to be a musician.
It would be crazy to write a movie – which, I’ve seen these movies before – where someone is a beginner, has their training montage, and all of a sudden, they’re an expert.
I don’t want to think I’m making fun of anything ever, especially my characters.
For me, I never look down at my characters.
Cinematically speaking, there’s more of a striking appeal to karate. It’s kicking and punching action. Jiu-jitsu is dudes rolling around and wrestling.
I think violence should be a bit much sometimes because I don’t like glorifying violence.
I’m definitely not making movies solely for myself. That’s something that I hear people say in the past, all they care about is that they like what they’re making. They don’t care what other people think. I think that’s a disservice to the project and to the people that are working on it.
The script for ‘The Art of Self-Defense,’ to be fair, I knew going into it that it was going to be a hard movie to get made.
I don’t plan a lot of shots, but going into shooting and prep, I’ve got certain things that stand out to me.
I’ll admit I’m still getting used to using preferred pronouns here and there. Actually changing the way that you address people can be a challenge. It’s not from a place of not understanding, but conditioning.
It just makes me laugh, when you talk to people who are ‘typical’ men, masculine, they watch sports and they can armchair quarterback, but they don’t do anything themselves and they judge your masculinity.
