Top 187 Quotes & Sayings by Steven Soderbergh - Page 3

A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best.

A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it's really not about that. Or rather it's about feelings in the abstract.

Anytime you've got something that can take you into the political realm then you've opened up the conversation a lot.

That's why my attitude, even on my larger-scale movies, is to make them cheap. The less these things cost, the better for everybody.

The key is, how do you feel with the one asshole? They cannot be talked to. That's why they are assholes.

I try to use other songs or bands as reference points - it seems like the easiest way to get across what are really differences of taste or opinion. If you know what kind of music somebody loves, then you can kind of figure out why they do what they do.

It takes one asshole to ruin the whole thing. That's it. One. The problem with the world is one asshole comes up with a really bad idea and now we're all taking our shoes off at the airport.

I grew up mostly in the South, and there's definitely something about the South that's different from the North. When people ask me where I'm from, I say Louisiana. I spent more years there than anywhere else.

I don't have any kind of ideology that precludes me from moving in one direction or another. I just want creative autonomy and I want at least an opportunity that it's going to be seen.

I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level.

The muscle memory of filtering away all the wrong versions of what you're doing improves the more time you're on a film set. I feel like my problem-solving algorithm got kicked up a notch.

You should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you're going to get crushed.

There's definitely a way of thinking and a way of being in the South that has its advantages and disadvantages.

It's become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen.

I'm not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post.And it means nothing to the audience. I'll chop limbs off. I'll put an arm where a leg should be. I'll do anything.

My working life is me doing what I want to do. This is that. I've made movies that people don't go to see.

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.

If you're not smart enough to know what Fidel meant during the Cuban revolution, that - when they were on the Granma - Fidel was already a rock star in Cuba, and how important that was to the indigenous population, then you're not paying attention.

A movie is something you see, cinema is something that’s made.

A real explosion is not only much more fun to shoot, it also helps the actors and creates an energy on set and ultimately in the scene.

The traditional models for success are just also disappearing.

The art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there.There's only the thing and what the thing needs to be.

My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen.

It's a world in which people's motives are questionable and shadowy.

The key is, if youre not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.

I'm not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post. It means nothing to the audience. I'll chop limbs off. I'll put an arm where a leg should be. I'll do anything.

People like Chris Nolan are shooting isolated sequences in IMAX. Those cameras are the size of a Volkswagen.

When we look at what's going on in the world and we see the immense level of conflict that seems to always be happening - you can always trace it back to competing narratives.

I just find it annoying that in these sequences [of the fight scenes], traditionally, there's music trying to pump you up. I don't like that, personally, as an audience member. This just reflects my taste.

Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn't made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn't have been able to make the thing that they liked.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

Everything had been done long before I started making movies. I mean, there's nothing that Godard hasn't already done. You can't do a single thing that Godard hasn't already thought of. And so you struggle to do something that is not predictable.

If you think that because you're Che, when you go into Bolivia, when people find out it's you, that they're going to have the same kind of reaction that the Cubans had to Castro, then you're high.

What's great about things like Kickstarter is that it enables me, finally, and without any bad feeling at all, when people come up to me now saying, "I want to do this." I can just go, "There are no excuses anymore."

We all get outraged by things and there are things that make us angry and maybe for a while we get angry enough to actually go do something about it.

People are sort of numb to watching violence, but sexual activity is still as strong as it ever was in terms of generating response.

It's a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it.

If you're a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you've got to build some long-term value.

I've found through experience that I'm only good when I'm writing something that, in essence, only I could write. The times I've written for hire, for other people, I don't think I've done very well.

I recently decided that I'm not an originator. I'm a synthesist.

There's a big difference between a movie about relationships and a movie in which people talk about relationships. It seems like a lot of people have confused the two.

I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.

I like a lot of different kinds of movies, I like a lot of different kinds of paintings.

If you're not flying people around on wires, and you're only allowing them to do things that people can really do, it can't go on for very long, because eventually somebody gets the drop on the other person and then it's over.

I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did.

I was lucky that I was getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of films, and I was liking them all. So it seemed logical to me that you could - as in the style of the studio directors of the 30s and 40s - jump from one genre to the next, with the same satisfaction.

Jude [Law] is really good at playing an obsessive. He has a very watchable quality when he's on a quest for something.

You're being mean to someone who's helping you. What is that? Everyone knows who the assholes are, and I avoid them.

The brief flashbacks are sun-kissed, summery and optimistic. It's the only place in the movie you will see red, yellow, orange, or any vibrant colors.

My father, who was the one who really got me hooked on movies, liked all kinds of films, and I saw all kinds of films at a very young age.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

I've never been a snob. It [movie] is just about stories. And I've never felt just because it's a big screen and you plop down your eight bucks that gives it a special meaning. It's just "Are you good at telling a story?"

My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.

There's a technical reason why I think that frame rate is weird and it has to with your brain's ability to scan beyond a certain rate. The point is I find it looks weird.

I have a friend whose theory is that you're from wherever you went to high school. I think that's mostly true.

Everybody, including me, has to submit to what it needs to be. The thing is at the top of the pyramid, the best version of the thing; we all have to serve that. You forget that at your own risk. And I think movies are too long, in general.

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but thats not reality, its just another aesthetic form of fiction.

I feel I need to really think about whether there's a way to use what skill I have to address things that outrage me, like the 13 year old girl getting stoned to death. Because I don't think making a movie is going to help that, or change that.

I think there are only two times that I've ever ended up paying somebody their quote. Like what they actually were worth in the marketplace.

I'm a big believer that if there's something you really want to do, don't walk away because of the deal.