Top 30 Derek Cianfrance Quotes

We had all these smiley family pictures all over the walls of my house, but I always found those pictures to be odd because we weren’t smiling all the time. I don’t want to paint the picture of a total dysfunctional house, but there were a lot of arguments in that house. A lot of pain.

To me, discomfort is a gift in the films that I’m making.

From making documentaries all these years, it doesn’t feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I’m always trying to shoot as though it’s really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I’m going to be following. I want to follow them.

I feel similar to a lot of people. I don’t feel unique. So what I’m trying to do in my films is provide something for people like me, but also a collection of scenes that instigate.

When I was a kid, I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war, and the other was that my parents would get a divorce; and when I was twenty, they split up, and I just felt like I needed to confront all those things that scared me as a kid – entering young adulthood and trying to have relationships.

When we make these movies, you sign up for an experience. It’s not just, ‘Action! Cut!’ There’s not that safety in it. It’s kind of a dangerous place to be. I mean, it is safe, but it gets personal. It’s no longer about saying the lines. It’s about really having an experience.

Every moment is, in some ways, eternal. Once you put something into the world, it stays there.

Seeing ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’ was an extraordinary experience because it made me realise that all the biblical stories and images I’d ignored as a child had sunk in by osmosis. I saw that my childhood was deeply rooted inside me.

I don’t have a life, really. I take my kids to school, and I go home, and I write. Then I go pick my kids up, make them dinner, put them to bed, and write some more.

When I cast great actors, I try to make extraordinary people ordinary, dealing with these extremely small intimate details of interpersonal relationships against an epic backdrop.

I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone’s scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that’s how I write.

I ask all my actors to do two things: I ask them to fail for me, and I ask them to surprise me.

When I cast someone in a movie, I have to absolutely trust who they are as a human being. Trust is the intangible of moviemaking.

I’m trying to be the coach. My actors are my players. They’re doing things that I’m too cowardly to do myself.

As a parent myself, I can appreciate the MPAA and what they’re supposed to do, but what happens with NC-17 is that the MPAA is basically taking away the rights of parents. They’re basically telling me that I can’t show my kids this movie if I decide they can see it.

You turn on the news, there’re no facts anymore. ‘Here’s what’s happening today,’ and then you cut to thirty minutes of people in little boxes, little windows, telling you their opinions on it. It seems like all the news is going on in the ticker-tape on the bottom of the news. It’s all opinion, it’s all editorial.

I love people that work with passion and love. When you make choices that way, there’s reverberations, consequences. That’s what I’m interested in, that echo, that ripple of choice.

Now, I love movies so much, but I find a lot of movies to be arrogant in the way they’re kind of know-it-alls – they have perfect characters on the screen that know everything about themselves.

There’s something so glorious in giving control to the world. I think that’s what I’m trying to do in my films – control the world but also let it be chaotic, let there be life.

If you make a movie that’s close to your heart, it will be close to other people’s.

I’m not the greatest reader. I feel like I have a bit of dyslexia or something, and that’s probably why I became a filmmaker. I have the need to communicate, the need to tell stories; and the need to understand stories led me to movies.

I think people need fantasy, but I think they also need to know that they’re not being lied to. I think sometimes the fantasy can betray people and become more difficult for people’s lives than just truth. I can’t stand delusion. Delusion makes me sick.

When I grew up, a director was Cecil B DeMille, a guy sitting down with a megaphone speaking. He was the voice of God, the image of God. When I went to start making docs, I quickly turned the megaphone to my ear not to my mouth. It’s more about funneling in the words and listening as doc filmmaker.

I think ‘GoodFellas’ is just a perfect film. From an efficiency of storytelling standpoint, from an entertainment standpoint, from a performance standpoint, from a use of music standpoint, from a cinematography and editing standpoint – to me, it’s just a perfect movie.

It’s like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life and just watch them swim. That’s what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.

There’s this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I’ve never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I’m certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We’re human beings.

With each character in a movie, I’m looking for a human being. I’m looking for a person. And to me, I’m looking for a person that’s full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that’s full of successes and failures, a person that’s full of joy and sorrow. I’m interested in people that are human beings that are alive.

I grew up Catholic, so I feel guilty about everything.

After ‘Place Beyond the Pines,’ honestly, I was sick of myself. Sick of my own ideas. I wanted to do an adaptation, but everything I’d been reading, I just didn’t understand it.

In terms of Ray Liotta, when I was a teenager growing up in Colorado, I didn’t have pictures of girls on my wall. I had pictures of Ray Liotta on my wall. Along with Mike Patton, he was one of my heroes.