A Quote by Billy Bob Thornton
The movies I've made about the South, they were my experience and it's something that I know.
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Growing up, movies were something my family and, later, my friends and I would stay up all night talking about. The movies I remember moved me and forced you to think about things that made you know yourself better.
The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.
Oddly enough, most of the books written about the subject aren't very good because they just focus on the more hateful movies that they did very early, early on when they were trying to, you know, get Germany into the war, whether it be anti-Semitic movies like "Jud Suss," or "The Eternal Jew," or movies made against the Polish to help, you know, create sympathy for them to invade Poland. You know, there'd be movies where there would be some German girl living in Poland who's raped by the Polish or something.
I just remember saying to myself that I'd much rather do movies than modeling, and that it was worth a try. I didn't really know anything about it. I hadn't seen many movies, or so-called, good movies. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Star Wars and Night of the Living Dead. When I got more curious about the movies, I thought they were something you had to learn about and go to school for and read every book.
I thought movies were handed down by God. I knew that theater was made by people because I saw the people in front of me, but movies seemed like they were delivered, wholly made, from Zeus's head or something.
I did two movies that were arthouse movies; they were critically successful but made no money at all... but after making those movies, I thought, 'I wouldn't watch my own movies when I was 16, and my buddies where I came from wouldn't watch my movies, because they were boring.'
Design and the urgency to preserve it - not as a museum relic, as a living experience. And for me, something that lives alongside mass-produced goods. I'm not saying get away from it. My battle is there is a marketplace for what people wear and what they eat and care about how things are made and not just that they were made, and that's the core focus. I know where things come from, I know their families. I do that throughout my life - I know who makes my suits, and I know where my eggs come from. Everyone and everything is accounted for and has accountability.
If you're black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the Canadian border, you're south.
I would like to talk about some of the things that happened that made me know that there was something wrong in the south from a child.
Coming from the South and growing up in L.A. where it was so segregated - worse than the South in many ways - all the people in my neighborhood were from the South. So you had that Southern cultured environment. The church was very important. And there were these folk ways that were there. I was always fascinated by these Southern stories, people would share these mystified experiences of the South. I wanted to talk about folklore.
My parents were going through a divorce, and I used to go spend all weekend at the movies to get away from it all. There was something about the sameness of the movies. It was a place for me to go to express my emotions, you know, and let it out.
The movies I made when I was 14 or 15, I have a hard time looking at those. Those were the awkward years. I don't know if anybody can look at something they did when they were 14 and not wince.
I prefer movies because the money is better and certainly because you really know where you stand when you are making movies, and I have made a lot of them: 50-something - I don't know.
Richard Donner made great movies. Seminal movies. The Academy, though, and we have to be careful here, should recognize popular films. Popular films are what make it all work. There was a time when popular movies were commercial movies, and they were good movies, and they had to be good movies. There was no segregation between good independent films and popular movies.
I know that sounds so circular, but for you, what you were made to do, is different than what I was made to do. But instead of spending all of our time having Bible studies about what we were made to do, go do stuff and you'll figure out what you were made to do, because you'll be great at some things and you'll be terrible at others.
For generations comedians have made jokes about Scots-Irish in the South inter-breeding. "I am my own grandpa" and all that stuff; you know, because they all were marrying their first cousins.
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