Top 50 David Lowery Quotes

Grief reveals itself in the most mundane activities, like eating. It’s never when you’re looking at old pictures.

I have a longstanding, unapologetic love for Ke$ha.

Digital is my safety net. I know how to use it, how to operate those cameras; it makes sense to me. Film is much more mysterious.

One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t finish college.

The only part of ‘A Ghost Story’ that was reactionary was a temporal one. I had spent so much time making ‘Pete’s Dragon’ that I was really impatient and excited to make something new. When this project presented itself, I was ready to jump right into it. I started shooting two days after ‘Pete’s Dragon.’

I never rejected religion, but it just ceased to be an overriding concern in my life.

Virginia Woolf’s literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ ‘To the Lighthouse’ and ‘Orlando,’ all of which have time as a central conceit.

I don’t think I’m the best screenwriter in the world. It’s just important to me to write my movies so I’m personally invested in them.

I love working with the same people. When I find someone I love and that I like working with, I don’t want to stop working with them.

‘Ain’t Them Bodies Saints’ wound up becoming a love story even though it was not initially meant to be one.

So many of my films involve houses or homes that have been abandoned. People trying to get back home. That’s an idea that I keep dealing with.

We build our legacy piece by piece, and maybe the whole world will remember you or maybe just a couple of people, but you do what you can to make sure you’re still around after you’re gone.

I can’t watch my movies at their premieres – I learned that lesson the hard way.

I take a great deal of value in things that are done by hand or executed by hand.

With ‘Pete’s Dragon,’ Disney was very excited about the movie I wanted to make; they were very supportive of it, and it was a smooth process. I was really surprised by that.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can’t not write the things that I direct.

If I can’t finish a screenplay, if I can’t get to the last page as a writer, it probably means it’s not a good movie for me to make.

Especially in the Western world, so much of our cultural ideas about grieving is about us, and I think it’s important to get beyond that sometimes.

I don’t like being pessimistic. I don’t like living my life with a nihilistic mindset.

There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that’s one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me – before me and ahead of me.

I think there is a value in leaving the world a little better off, and movies can do that in a minor way.

I have a repository of titles I like in my head, and I am always looking for a movie that I can put one on.

I’m always making movies for my audiences, but I’m not trying to meet their expectations.

I love movies. I can’t participate in my love of movie-making fully unless I’m producing it.

With any movie that gets remade, whether I like the remake or not, I’m glad that I can still go watch the original that I love. If the remake is offering something different, I really value that because I’m having a new experience and adding something new to my life.

I think, with ‘St. Nick,’ when you’re working with a smaller budget, you have fewer risks involved. You’re able to take chances with style and content.

In the past, I’d been sort of a fan of writing a coat hanger of a script, and something I could hang ideas off of.

I love ‘Peter Pan’ to death. It’s one of the most influential pieces of storytelling in my life. It made a huge impact on how I grew up. I love the cartoon. I love the 2003 version.

I made ‘St. Nick’ on a 30-page outline. ‘Aint’ Them Bodies Saints’ was a full-bodied script, but it still had a lot of room for improvisation. There were scenes that weren’t there on the page – just a sentence saying something happens. I was like, ‘We’ll figure this out when we shoot it.’

One of my favorite rules of writing: stop whenever it’s feeling really good so you have something to look forward to the next day.

I love the Spanish language.

There are some stories – not even stories, some feelings – that you can’t accomplish in cinema without using celluloid.

I make movies to be watched the way I want to watch them, and I want to watch them in movie theatres.

No two people who make a movie on a certain budget scale are going to achieve the same thing because it just depends on what sort of favors you can call, and what sort of dynamics you can pull in the play.

In my darkest moments, I have not eaten an entire pie, but I have turned to other baked goods to find solace.

I can’t solve a puzzle for the life of me – my brain doesn’t work that way. But I can take a very simple idea and extrapolate from it and spend time with it and pull things out of it.

I love dialogue, but I’m also terrified of it. In all my movies, I’ve done my best to cut out as much dialogue as possible. I love the spaces in those silences. Even in ‘Pete’s Dragon,’ I was so happy that the first twenty minutes have about five or six lines of dialogue.

I try to live my life with grace and through grace even though I don’t particularly believe in the divine – and that’s a direct result of my having been raised Catholic.

Time goes by so slowly when you’re a child, and then, as an adult, it goes by in the blink of an eye.

I often conflate the domestic and the cosmic on a daily basis.

Obviously ‘Pete’s Dragon’ is more commercial than ‘A Ghost Story,’ but when making them, I’m just trying to tell a story that matters to me, that ultimately would satisfy me as a moviegoer. Because watching movies is my favorite thing to do. I watch a lot of them.

I know I have trouble watching my own films.

The image of a bedsheet ghost standing all alone in an empty house was something I was obsessed with. I really wanted to make a film about that image, and I was waiting for the right story to come along. When it did, I did my best to honor that image.

When you cut from a long shot to a close shot, you’re doing it for a reason, or if you let something stay in long shot for a long take. On the short films, I was teaching myself how to express something personal cinematically, how to use the language of film the best I could.

Some filmmakers are great at making complex things and films with a lot of moving parts, and I’m just not that way.

The first movie I ever saw in the cinema was Walt Disney’s ‘Pinocchio,’ upon its 1984 re-release, which would have put me at three years old.

David Lynch’s ‘Fire Walk With Me’ has a scene in it that scared me so bad that I don’t remember it. I blocked the memory out – repeatedly! I’ve seen the film two or three times, and I can never remember what it is that scares me.

In dialogue scenes, my favorite moments are when people aren’t talking because you can cut to the heart of the matter much more quickly, often with a look. People hide things in words. When you don’t have words to hide things in, it becomes much more direct and much more immediate of a connection.

I think all people are familiar with thinking about their death and trying to come to terms with the fact that we will, at some point, no longer exist. The loss of one’s ego is very tough to reconcile with; you really have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to wrap your head around the idea of just not existing anymore.

I like being able to go to the cinema and sit and spend time observing something without thinking about plot or what one character is saying. I feel like I’m able to connect on a much more profound level.