A Quote by Melvin Van Peebles

I'm not a cinematic cinematic person. I go to the movies like I did back when I was a kid. I go to the movies and I sit down. If the music works, hmm. If it doesn't work, hmm. The whole concept of the thing, not as one piece here or there. For me, music is a large part.
I didn't go to many movies. My mom would make a family outing and bring chicken in the theater. Smell up the whole place. The most impactful movies were 'Godfather II' and 'Scarface'. I loved the human complexity, and those movies are so well shot. Cinematic greatness. I really stopped going in my early twenties.
Both cinematic culture and the culture at large have changed profoundly. We're now in post-cinematic digital culture, and the internet has obviously usurped movies, which are no longer central to our lives, at least not as a collective spectator experience.
Now there’s us, staking out our piece of cinematic turf (might be small but it’s ours). And the music has to fit the vision as specifically as it did for [Star Wars and The Matrix.] OUR music comes from THEIR music, this scrappled bunch. It is spare, intimate, mournful and indefatigable.
If I have a rare Saturday night when I can go out to see a movie, I look at the paper and I go, 'Hmm, what's the best medicine for my mind?' I'm going, 'What's the most escapist, fun entertainment I can go to?' So I think that's number one, first and foremost, because that's why I think people go to movies. It's a bonus that there's something real.
I did sit in cinemas as a kid looking at English and American movies thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if the characters were like real people?" And the worst thing is films are constantly advertising themselves, drawing attention to their style of things. But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic. But you don't want the audience thinking about the bloody film. You want them to think about what's going on, and believe in it. Be flies on the wall, you know?
Some of my favorite movies are Hollywood movies. Hollywood is part of the cinematic spectrum. I nurture a healthy love-hate relationship with Hollywood.
'Birds of a Feather' is on Netflix, and it did big for me. For me, it was a trial and error thing. I never thought about being an actor. I just felt like, in the music industry now, anything you said can go. So now it's a part of what I do. I make movies now.
Music and books were my inspiration too. I read avidly as a kid. And that's the beautiful thing about books and music and even movies, is that you can actually escape. You can go into other worlds.
There are a bunch of different movies I feel that way about. However, there is a debate because as you may know after MST3K ended there have been things like Cinematic Titanic that are the children and the grandchildren of this way of dissecting movies and making fun of them and in a way celebrating the absurdity of those movies as well. There are certain movies that sort of fit into the MST3K paradigm which is hidden gems, these weird horror/sci-fi/fantasy movies.
When you write a scene where somebody is afraid of something you instantly go to decades of genre cinema: horror, suspense, and thrillers. Those are very cinematic genres, when you shoot a close-up of someone and you can see fear in the person's face, or anticipation, or some kind of anxiety, it's a very cinematic image.
3D is quite a lot more advanced in animated movies; for live-action movies we're just taking baby steps, we're just in the beginning. So when I think of doing that I was very excited. It didn't go as far as I think it should, I'm still a novice, but I think it's fair to say it's a new cinematic medium, experience.
I often envy a filmmaker or a playwright or an author where people are like, "Yeah, I sat down every night and read your book and it was beautiful." Or, "Yeah, I went to the movies and all I did was watch the movie because that's all you could do at the movies." Where with music, it's like, "Ugh, I love your music. I listen to it while I'm jogging thinking about how I hate my body." But it is also the privilege of being a musician is you can have your music in this documented form and play it live and that's, I think, what draws me to it the most.
No man wants to settle down. It happens. Eventually you're going to bump into somebody that makes you go, 'Hmm, I don't mind seeing this person every day.'
What's it like going back? Fun and sexy. That's the point. It's - the only reason to go back to an old boyfriend is because you think hmm, maybe.
If I make a movie that has a whole bunch of music in it, I get to listen to the music all day long, and I don't have to say, 'Well, I gotta go back to work and I gotta stop listening to the music.' I get to listen to music and go to work.
Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.
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