A Quote by Travis Mathews

The male intimacy and raw honesty was already developing on the page 'Oscillate Wildly' with these characters. Being explicit would not only distract and alienate certain audiences, it would limit who has access to the film, and that's something I think a lot about with this story.
A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.
Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.
I think 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' is a good example of a film where you have to juggle a whole lot of information to follow that story, and even if you haven't read the book, it seems to go pretty well. And that is a film where the characters didn't meet until 74 minutes into the film, not on page 17.
If we can tell a good story with characters audiences can care about, I'd like to think that prejudices can fall aside and people can just experience the story and these characters for the human beings that they are.
Since I knew I was going to make a film that was purely about emotions, and I knew that I ran the risk of being accused of amnesia relating to the social film, to prevent this I decided it would be good to have characters who were on the margins of society. These are characters for whom love is really the only way to know that they're alive.
"Oscillate Wildly" is in many ways a story of first love and how it challenges our hero's guarded sense of what's possible.
Anyone who's seen the Wigan [League] players stripped has been faced with the raw truth of the matter... No time for male modelling, and even Princess Di would think twice about getting too close to that lot.
The thought crossed my mind about not wanting to alienate my fan base, but I don't know what would alienate them or bring them in, so I decided not to think about it.
I would say any film can be called feminist that has female characters who have agency in their life, that are in charge of their fate or do important things or take up half the space. I would consider a film feminist, I don't care what it's about, but if the cast was gender balanced, where it would be just as likely that the boss or the best friend or whoever was female. It's really as simple as showing women being in charge of their destiny and giving female characters a voice.
It's rare to see women in a film who are not somehow validated by a male or discussing a male or heartbroken by a male,or end up being happy because of a male. It's interesting to think about, and it's very true.
With independent film, simply because they don't have the money to make a big-budget film, they're forced to make a story that's important to them, that they would like to see on film, a personal story that people can relate to, about people, where you can see the love of the characters.
The funniest things just come from honesty. We have a tendency to see female characters as representative of something larger than what they are, when male characters are just characters.
I make films that are very personal, and I always have. It's kind of the only thing that I think I have to offer as a filmmaker: the intimacy I've had with experience in a particular world, so the film comes from things I've seen and things I've felt. It gets transformed by the process. I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.
I would hope with all my heart that people understand this and see it in the film. And there are also other messages in Happy Feet, like racial and environmental ones, but none of them are so overt. George has made a great story about penguins with a lot of humanity in it and audiences can follow a species we don't know that well.
I think in the '80s, when I started making films, we were all suspicious of these technologies. We were all convinced they would filter out any emotion and sense of intimacy, and the films I made during that period reflected that. In fact, what has happened is the opposite. I think we're saturated with a degree of intimacy we would never have expected, and we're trying to sort through this idea of complete access to each other's lives on an ongoing basis. Our emotions aren't filtered out at all. They're actually accelerated.
I just write and do what I think is funny. Sometimes, you do have it in your head about certain bits. There are certain jokes where I know if I did them in certain situations, it would irk people. There are times where I look at the news and see a story going on, and I'm like, 'Wow, if I tweeted this, I would get press if I wanted to.'
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