A Quote by Chris Cunningham

Probably one of the reasons I don't work in the mainstream anymore is that I'm only interested in making the stuff I want to make — © Chris Cunningham
Probably one of the reasons I don't work in the mainstream anymore is that I'm only interested in making the stuff I want to make
Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world. You're just trying to make a love letter, a gift.
I mean, maybe I'm alternative in that my stuff's not mainstream, doesn't want to be mainstream, could never be mainstream.
Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world.
I hope I'm in a position to make stuff that I really want to make as opposed to stuff that I just have to make for money reasons, or to sustain a certain marquee value.
I only want to work with actors that really get it and make it work. I didn't want it to be a star-driven thing anymore.
When you're making an adaptation, you have to make content for the fans; otherwise, you'll get something that won't even be accepted by the mainstream. You want to make something that the fans will approve and the mainstream will enjoy.
Sometimes we want to engage in a war for financial reasons, for strategic reasons, for moral reasons, for all sorts of reasons, and it's important when we're making that decision to remind ourselves of what happens to the people on the front lines when we start this process.
Every choice you make as an actor ends up being really influential on your life, because you're spending a lot of time working on this project, and you want to make sure you're making good choices and you're not making them for the wrong reasons. I just want to be careful and not jump into anything.
I'm not interested in what they have to say. I'm only interested in people that are interested in me for the right reasons.
Sometimes, you just have to realize, I'm not doing stuff that is really mainstream stuff, and to try and put it out in a mainstream way is almost psychotic.
I want to stop making decisions based on money, start saying no to stuff I don't have fun with anymore.
I still use the pronoun she for my publicity materials, and for mainstream media stuff, for two reasons: the first is that I do a lot of work in public schools, and I want those young women and girls to see every kind of she there can be. I want them to see my biceps and my shorn hair and shirt and tie and for some of them to see me as a possibilityI want them to see me living outside of the boxes, because they might be asphyxiating in their own box and need to see there is air out here for them to breathe, that all they have to do is lift the lid a little.
There are two aspects to making movies: One is the feeling of wanting to push myself into stuff that I don't know how to do. Then there's the other impulse to try and earn a living. I want to be careful about not confusing those too much - not that those things can't have a healthy overlap. Plenty of people start out making work that isn't terribly commercial, and then make work that's more commercial but still good. You just want to watch out for that thing where you tell yourself that you're doing your best work when you're not.
I don't want to think my life as a career. I'm interested in my work only because of the meaning I can make.
Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither an audience nor reward. Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next. Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.
I never thought I would work in mainstream superhero comics or Valiant or Marvel. I just set out to make the kinds of stories I wanted to make, which at the beginning was small personal stuff like 'Essex County.'
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