A Quote by Alexander Weinstein

"Moksha" is really a satire of myself. I've always been interested in Eastern spirituality. I'm particularly interested in enlightenment and the spiritual pursuit to liberate ourselves (I'm a Buddhist at heart). During my teenage years, I imagined I'd end up going to India to become a yogi; study with the last living saints in a cave; give up all my worldly possessions; learn to levitate. And there's still part of me that can see myself "disappearing" for some years at an ashram somewhere.
Somewhere in my early twenties I realized I was pretty constantly monitoring myself, judging how I was always falling short, whether it was about not being a good enough daughter or friend, or my appearance, or whatever. I ended up becoming involved with a spiritual path in the yogic tradition, living in an ashram, doing a very rigorous spiritual practice.
I've always been really interested in the future, and I feel like all of the movies that I've been exposed to, over the course of the last 20 to 30 years, have shown me a future that I don't really want to be living in.
The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.
The funny thing is that I've known since I was 7 years old that I was never going to have kids. I always imagined myself as this worldly, traveling gypsy lady.
Part of me wanted to disappear into a cave in India, and I did end up going on retreats there, but, don't ask me why, I always felt very strongly that the point for me was to find a way to live a truly spiritual life in the modern day world and be able to work with all the positive aspects of our cultural and technological advancements.
I have for many years interested myself in the study of children from three years upwards. Many have urged me to continue my studies on the same lines with older children. But what I have felt to be most vital is the need for more careful and particularized study of the tiny child.
I'm often asked by younger filmmakers, 'Why do I need to look at old movies?' I've made a number of pictures in the last 20 years and the response I have to give them is that I still consider myself a student. The more pictures I've made in 20 years, the more I realize I really don't know. And I'm always looking for something or someone that I could learn from. I tell the younger filmmakers, and the young students, that do it like painters used to do—that painters do—study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn.
The thing about humour is that the super-ego is also at play, so what interested me, particularly in the last chapter which is key to the book -and no one seems to have picked this up in writings on Freud - is that, in the later Freud, the essence of humour is the ability to look at myself and find myself ridiculous. That makes me laugh.
I've always been interested, since graduate school, in why some children wilt and shrink back from challenges and give up in the face of obstacles, while others avidly seek challenges and become even more invested in the face of obstacles. So this has been my primary question for over 40 years.
It was a scary decision to let cameras into my life, but if I was going to do it, I just wanted to be really honest and kind of introduce myself as an adult. I think the world met me as a young girl, and they still associate me with who I was when I was 13, they still don't understand how over the last eight years what has happened and who I've become.
There were periods of my life when a lot of people didn't believe in me. I still had faith in myself. I really had to ask myself life questions. Where do I see myself in five years? Create a ladder for yourself, and walk up the steps. Climb that ladder.
For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves. All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
I had no plan for that year but it wound up being one of the most important years of my football coaching career. It hit me along the way that I needed to really get at the heart of what's really true to myself. And then I was able to mold it and shape it in the years at SC to become the approach and the concept and the culture that we try to create here at Seattle.
I've always said that I count myself as a classical crossover artist. To be so, you have to have the core classical training, which I did for many, many years, but also be interested in the pop side of things. You can fit in somewhere in the middle. I feel I do that really well.
Consequently, I get inspiration from all over the place. But it's not like a calculated thing on my part, or a way that I see myself, you know? I'm just interested in things that move me, and I don't care where they come from. In fact, I'm interested if they come from a place I wouldn't expect, or would seem foreign to me on some level.
I read a lot until was about 12, then as a teenager I was more interested in kissing boys. But I kept a diary for a few years, so words were a big part of my teenage years.
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