A Quote by Philippe Petit

I wanted all my life to give my world into other arts - books, plays, movies - but I didn't want to sell out. — © Philippe Petit
I wanted all my life to give my world into other arts - books, plays, movies - but I didn't want to sell out.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.
When books and plays are made into movies, they frequently want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks.
No one forces me, or any other writer, to sell a film option on the books. If you don't want to run the risk that the filmmakers may adapt your work in a way you don't like, then you don't sell the option. You know when you sell it that they will have to make some changes, just because film and TV are different media than books.
I am so happy because I want more people to like martial arts movie not just martial arts audience. Even martial arts can be used in comedy, in drama, in horror movies, in different kinds of movies.
Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books.
If I wanted to do TV full-time, 'Breaking Bad' is definitely the type of project I would want to do. But TV is not my favorite thing in the world. I definitely want to focus on film. It's what I grew up loving. It's always been about movies, movies, movies, movies, movies. I really want to make great films.
In my mind, martial arts movies are martial arts movies and action is action. It's quite different, because martial arts doesn't just have physical form; you have a philosophy, internal and external. A lot of it involves your life. How you see the world. An action film I think is just about the movement. I think it's different.
From an early age, I knew I wanted to pursue a life in the arts, and so I was acting in plays all throughout high school.
Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.
My bookshelves have no order. I prune them regularly and sell the books to Myopic Books, a Chicago bookstore. They give me store credit, and then I spend all the store credit, and, presumably, return to sell them back more of the books I bought from them.
Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, Is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can't communicate, Children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on, And in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up!
I can't do the same movies all my life. I'm conscious of that. But it's a trade-off. 'Dear John' allowed me to do movies I've wanted to do. You learn to balance it out. I'm still learning. Only now am I getting to do the kinds of movies that I have wanted to do. So it's a steady climb. You don't jump into a Soderbergh film.
The advice I would give to girls from Eastern backgrounds who are interested in the arts is that it is always beneficial to get your academic studies out of the way before going into the competitive world of the arts.
I love my martial arts and action movies. They give another dimension to the acting world: the emotional plus the physical.
Always keep absorbing art and looking at paintings and reading books and watching movies in other languages, just getting to know the world at hand and the world of the past. It's important to keep absorbing the world and keep engaging with it, and often that means not thinking about movies and thinking about other things.
What I really wanted wasn't what I thought I was supposed to want. It wasn't what people had told me I should want or that books and movies and TV had put across. What I really wanted was to be a working artist, which I am.
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