Top 55 Zal Batmanglij Quotes

A director really doesn’t deal with performance that much, especially if you deal with great actors. Their work is the performance. What you’re helping them with is all the stuff they cannot be in control of.

I think that ‘Sound of My Voice’ is about the claustrophobia of living today, and how do you crawl out of the claustrophobia towards the light?

I think we have to go through a lot of rituals in order to fill the gap of meaning in our lives.

I think if aliens came to Earth, we would laugh. If there was an alien technology, we would laugh.

People don’t really believe that their computer or sneakers are made by small hands, a child’s hands, or a person who is living such a miserable life. They somehow think that, no, that person has a tough life, but it’s an OK life.

A good story isn’t preachy; a good story is always entertaining.

I guess it the one consistent thing in my life was that sense of magic that film provide – I still remember the movies from my childhood that I loved.

It’s funny how quickly human beings adapt.

Actors love to do extreme things, so that is why they become actors; otherwise, they’d be novelists.

You think it’s so cool to have movie stars in your movie, but they become people.

‘The Terminator’ is grounded in so much realism. It’s again a story that centers around a woman that isn’t a ‘woman’s picture’ necessarily. I found it really thrilling, both ‘Terminator 1’ and ‘2.’ When you watch it it’s such fine storytelling.

In every public space, everyone has their head down on their phone. Including me.

If you want to make an anarchist film, make it with a corporation.

It’s awesome to be part of a gay family.

The country gets so beat up in the media. It’s worth remembering how much we love America.

I hate Q&As. They make me feel awkward.

Whatever you think of Edward Snowden, it took bravery to do what he did.

I love James Cameron. I love what he does.

‘The East’ could easily be a TV show.

I think ‘The East’ is political.

‘Terminator’ is one of my favorite films, and so is ‘Terminator 2.’

Nobody can seem more politicised and glamorous than the baby-boomers. But their kids are surprisingly robust and late bloomers.

You just have to make sure you keep living your life, challenging yourself, putting yourself in unusual experiences, thinking about what you’re interested in doing, and going there.

It took us nine months to write ‘The East’; we didn’t start writing it on the computer until seven and a half months into it.

I remember in grade school having a group of friends and enjoying that sense of community, enjoying living in an imaginary world that wasn’t just by yourself or your sibling but a whole group of people.

I think about a lot of my favorite directors, and I think about their first films, and I have great admiration for the earthiness of those films.

I went to graduate school for directing at AFI in L.A., and I wanted to be a director.

We want to make a 100 million dollar movie that we have created, in the way James Cameron or Chris Nolan does. It’s so inspiring when high-quality auteurs are writing and directing those movies. That’s pretty cool.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend shooting a feature film on a still camera.

Violence doesn’t interest me very much.

People are frustrated all over the country, whether they’re in Oklahoma or Oregon or San Diego or San Francisco or L.A. or D.C. or New York or Omaha or wherever.

I think if I was interested in writing on my own, I would be a novelist – then you could write about yourself, and that would be it. You wouldn’t need anyone else.

I love being on a movie set.

I think it’s really important that you don’t get caught up in the way the filmmaking community isolates you and the way your life ends up being.

On ‘Sound of My Voice,’ I was the first and last word, which is kind of a dictatorship. I like collectives, though.

Claustrophobia is a theme that I feel is really rife in ‘Sound of my Voice’ and struggling to come up for air from that feeling.

A film set is all about hierarchy, but I always like to think about the circus. In the circus, there’s this real sense of tribalism, and they’re all on the road together. I don’t think the ring leader is more important than the clown. They all work together, and I think that I felt that on ‘The East.’

I love watching ‘House of Cards.’

Existing outside of irony is so hard.

That’s the key thing I learned from making ‘The East’: It doesn’t matter what happens in your life, good or bad. What matters is that there’s a group around you to catch you when you fall and push you back up a little bit.

I want to make the iPhone of movies.

If you really want to have an anarchist experience, make a movie with a studio.

I think we’re really hungry for family in America, especially when I feel like people are really pulled apart from their families.

People are longing for tribe and community.

We’re taught that food in a dumpster is waste. But when you find bags of bread that are perfectly good, all of a sudden that waste turns into bounty. That’s an important shift in perception.

I thought ‘Gone Baby Gone’ was really modern in showing a couple going on an adventure.

I wanted to be a filmmaker, so my parents helped me by encouraging me to save my allowance. So I bought my first video camera, and I would make movies, but I never made a movie that I finished until I was in college. There was no expectation, but I would make movies every day.

You can’t just express yourself and it becomes a movie. You have to get beyond that.

We entered ‘Lucid Grey’ into the Georgetown festival on April 27, 2001. Now ‘Sound of My Voice’ is opening on April 27, 11 years later. It couldn’t have happened in a more perfectly cinematic way.

I don’t want to make a 100 hundred million dollar movie I have no stake in.

I always think that ‘Sound of My Voice’ is a movie about the crumbs in ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ You know, those crumbs. It’s about finding your way out of the claustrophobia and alienation of modern life.

Marvel’s storytelling is much wilder than ‘The OA’s,’ but no one talks about that.

I’m very fascinated by genre.

Sci-fi always appealed to me, like, since I was a kid.

It doesn’t really matter what someone’s hair looks like or if the sound is perfect. Every director who’s made a couple of movies knows that, because you can replace the sound. Or, like, any one shot is not that important, because they all add up together.