A Quote by Abdellah Taia

Writing and making films aren't different things to me. Or maybe it has become so, now. Making film is a very long process and you have to be physically strong. The literary work is more mystical, because it's only the writer, and connected to something inside.
I enjoy the making of the film and it's something for me to do. If nobody ever comes to my films, if people don't want to give me money to make films, that will stop me. But as long as people come all over the world and I have an audience and I have ideas for films, I will do them for as long as I enjoy the process. And I like the whole process of making a film.
My literary criticism has become less specifically academic. I was really writing literary history in The New Poetic, but my general practice of writing literary criticism is pretty much what it always has been. And there has always been a strong connection between being a writer - I feel as though I know what it feels like inside and I can say I've experienced similar problems and solutions from the inside. And I think that's a great advantage as a critic, because you know what the writer is feeling.
I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.
I think making electronic music isn't much different from writing a book or painting a picture or making a film. It's a creative process, and it's an art form.
In the film industry you work very long hours, and making a film is a very intense process.
It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.
I'm a storyteller, I'm not a literary writer, and I don't want to be a literary writer. People say to me, "Oh, when are you going to write something different?" What? I don't want to write anything different. I'm writing relationships between people, all different colors, all different sizes, all different sexual orientations, and that's what I want to do.
When I left university I was sure that I was going to be a painter. Then I had a crisis, a revelation. I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial. I got married and started writing fiction. What was wonderful is that it gave me my freedom because no-one can tell me I can't work. Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.
The more I go on in this career of making albums, writing songs and playing music, the more I think of each album as a movie. I really wanted to make a film, but making a film is much more expensive than making a record.
Maybe I should be a literary agent. I'm good at picking up on books that become successful before it happens. I could pick up a lot more money than making films.
You learn so much from making mistakes, not even necessarily mistakes that I've made, a lot of the time the films just don't work out because it's a really difficult process. And sometimes there's a certain person underlining process. But I've had an opportunity to work on all different types of films and I have had a lot of opportunities to stretch myself in different ways and now is the time where I get to try and figure out out the roles that I can really play well and play them well.
Cartooning is completely different from other media: it is closely related to film and prose, other narrative forms, but the skills needed to realize a story are very different, and include not only drawing and writing dialogue and narration, but graphic design and the ability to depict time passing visually. It's a whole suite of skills that has to go into making a comics page, skills that are quite distinct from those that go into writing a page of prose, or making a film.
Maybe I've got to admit that what I did here was enough. I can make some more films. Maybe I'll direct a film. Maybe I'll have my musical put on stage. But nothing, really, to be absolutely honest, competes with making a very successful pop band for 10 years of my life.
I do feel like animated films really combine a lot of different of art forms: film-making and writing and drawing and painting - to a certain extent, even sculpting. It's a wonderful medium to work with as a craftsman because it's such so rich and so varied and so expressive.
What's nice about writing and making films is that being able to see a film from the outside - from the inception through production and then completion - just informs what you're doing when you're an actor. And when you're an actor, it informs the decisions you make when you're making a film. It's using two different sides of your personality.
[Writing something original from scratch], the initial process is way different. But once it exists and you start to actually work on making it real, then the approach is kind of the same, for me anyways.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!