Top 30 Shane Carruth Quotes

Probably the TV show I’ve watched the most is ‘How It’s Made’ on the History Channel. I could watch 24 hours of ‘How It’s Made’ and never get bored.

I believe that filmmakers have to internalize the story and subtext so well that all of the departments can start to speak to each other – that music can speak to cinematography can speak to writing and back again.

From a completely financial standpoint, digital is starting to crack as far as an independent filmmaker’s access to getting your story out there – Amazon, iTunes, all of those. It makes the prospect of doing it yourself – not easy by any means – but possible, maybe for the first time.

I don’t read books on how to write screenplays just because I’m stubborn. So it’s all sort of made up.

I got a degree in math, from not a good school in Texas, and then I went to work as a software engineer. Just not glamorous at all.

It’s a risk, but I’m sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, ‘If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.’ No, it won’t, and you end up with little more than books on film.

My favorite films are the ones that I walk away from and I know I saw a story.

I love to work. It’s the idea of having someone else tell you how to make your film or how to sell it – that’s the part I can’t really deal with. I would rather do 1,000 things that are work than deal with one thing that’s a political problem.

I don’t typically have a social life, I don’t have a family, and I will stay up all night, every night, for days on end, to solve something that I think is solvable. And it’s very frustrating sometimes, because I know that I’m like that, and it’s not always a positive result.

‘Pierrot le Fou’ is something I keep coming back to. It’s so surreal but still really engaging – it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.

I love the concept of the romance that exists when people are broken. Like, the promise of a romance when you’re at the bottom. I think that’s infinitely compelling and romantic.

In school, when I got into upper-level math, there would be times when I would wake up from a dream and have – not an answer, exactly, but a direction to pursue. My writing has always been like that. I wake up from dreams knowing which direction to go in.

I came to filmmaking because it’s my passion. I decided I can’t have it distorted or marred by someone else deciding what it should be.

I don’t believe that narrative works when it’s trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth.

I think I’ll always want to write and direct. I’m interested in producing and helping other people tell stories. But I’m still in love with writing and directing.

Film is a collaborative process, absolutely, but I am a control freak.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That’s why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you’re not looking, you’ll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That’s narrative; that’s passing stuff down.

I’ve always been anxious about ‘Primer.’ There’s good things about it, but all I’ve seen for a long time is the flaws.

I’m only interested in science fiction that’s used as a literary device, a shortcut into something more exploratory or universal about our experience. That’s why I think it was invented and why mythology was invented; it’s a tool, not an end to itself.

The only thing I can ever do is make a film that I can respond to. I could not make a romantic comedy for college girls. I wouldn’t know how that works.

I will be making films, and I’m going to keep working, no matter what I have to do. And I don’t plan to ever ask for permission from anybody.

I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, ‘Well, that’s emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.’ I have difficulty thinking that’s the way we experience things.

My job as an author – at least the way I think of it – is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.

I don’t spend a lot of time in nature. Probably less than most people that live in urban Texas.

Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they’re about, I probably wouldn’t be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what’s at the heart of a film.

I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn’t even need to show up.

I’m constantly surprised by… an orange will roll off a table, and I’ll catch it before I knew it was falling. Something happens there. We could write it off and say, ‘Subconsciously I knew that was happening,’ but there’s so many things every day – I’m amazed by how little we know.

It’s interesting because I don’t ever want to ask a better question than I can answer, if that makes sense. I find that frustrating as a viewer. Compelling questions, while not easy, are easier than compelling answers.

Any film that exists that is thorough, you can’t give it to an audience of one and have that be effective communication. Communication involves an audience of many that have a conversation, put it through the ringer, filter it and then a sense of it coalesces.

‘The Master,’ it was really important to me to go see that in the theater, but that’s a very rare occurrence for me. I typically enjoy things on my laptop. I’m in bed; I can be able to pause them.