A Quote by Erica Jong
Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.
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Sometimes I'll have words or concepts written down before I have any type of music or anything. So when I have that, sometimes I just hear a beat and, if I feel like it'll match with the story that I have written down sonically, then I'll just pair them together.
The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same.
You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop.
One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.
I learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that they should do the same with one another: that they didn't need a book of rules to tell them what to do and what not to do, but experience and action.
The kind of loving women and men have in them and the ways it comes out from them makes for them the bottom nature in them, gives to them their kind of thinking, makes the character they have all their living in them, makes them then their kind of women and men and there are always many millions made of each kind of them.
'Writing' is the wrong way to describe what happens to words in a movie. First, you put down words. Then you rehearse them with actors. Then you shoot the words. Then you edit them. You cut a lot of them, you fudge them, you make up new ones in voice-over. Then you cut it and throw it all away.
So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.
Bend words. Stretch them, squash them, mash them up, fold them. Turn them over or swing them upside down. Make up new words. Leave a place for the strange and downright impossible ones. Use ancient words. Hold on to the gangly, silly, slippy, truthful, dangerous, out-of-fashion ones.
There are a lot of things that you see in the world ...We have a collection of gloves that have been run over by trucks that a friend named JP Williams collects. They are really beautiful. They look like sculpture. And he has a hundred pictures of them - we're making a book out of them. It's all that kind of ephemera, things that exist that no one really looks at unless it's put to them in a certain way.
There are some things I cannot do as I did before the accident. Trying to do them the same way was impossible, and I was getting frustrated. Then one day I said to myself that I had to relearn those things and do them in a different way and see what was possible, and how it could be achieved.
Words are such powerful things. We can rip somebody apart with them, we can write words down that can forever hurt another person. We can use them to tell stories and lies. We can misquote them and change what other people said to make ourselves look good.
Every form of power comes down to language. In law, there's all kinds of words you don't know if you're not a lawyer and that gives them power. In business, it's the same thing.
And we live in a kind of realm of language and words and so forth. So we can sort of relate to them. They don't exist without us. We create words.
In order to be kind, one must do. There is no point in thinking good thoughts and not acting on them. There is no currency in wishing things were better but not rolling up one's sleeves and helping to change them.
What we usually do to great men and women is relegate them to homogenised heroism. Their words and actions become soundbites and images in a way that gives us an excuse not to act bravely in our own lives.
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