A Quote by James Gray

The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject.
I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.
I look up so much to those movies, 'Airplane!' and 'Naked Gun.' I think that stuff is so funny. I grew up just loving all that stuff and sort of idolizing Leslie Nielsen.
I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.
I grew up loving horror films. But I had to step away since I didn't want all that negative stuff in my psyche. I didn't want to conceptualize those thoughts into my life.
I grew up with 'Roseanne'; I kind of adore her and stuff like' Home Improvement', really traditional American stuff.
In the '90s, I kind of put aside all those things I loved in the '80s and I got really into watching foreign films and art films and stuff like that, and sort of soaking those up.
I grew up listening to country music. I got into traditional stuff later, but I listened to the commercial stuff of the '90s, especially the women who were so strong, like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea. It's a great art form.
I love movies; I grew up loving movies. I've always loved movies. I never thought about making movies until I took art classes and then I started studying different artists. As you study paintings, you see light and shadow, of course - Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix. You start to understand the relationship between people and art, and images. For me, between movies that I watched and art, it was like, I'd love to make moving art. Moving pictures.
I love our country. My dad served in the army. I always grew up with a song sense of belonging as an American. But I was also in the counterculture and I was coming from a place of fearing the police. So I was anti-establishment, but also loving your country. It's kind of an ironic sort of upbringing.
I was never that kid who grew up in New York and was always at the arthouse watching important films. I was the kid who grew up in the Midwest where there weren't any art films, and I watched TV. And that was really the medium that affected me and that I fell in love with.
I love dressing up. I like going out and buying some crazy stuff. I like stuff that's new, innovative and weird. I just pick out stuff that is unique and anything that I'm really diggin'. I don't really care if it's kind of out there. That's what I'm about. I like picking stuff that is really different.
Mel Brooks is an interesting one because he started out making films about stuff that he was totally affectionate about, like musicals, westerns, horror films, Hitchcock films. And then, as they get further on, and you get to 'Spaceballs,' then it's just kind of contrived.
I try to teach a modernist and postmodernist position. On one hand, if you're a painter, you need to know the history of painting. But I'm also interested in the moment we live in. I love television, and movies, and books, and music. So I also think of art as this cultural production along with all this other stuff that's happening. So that's a kind of postmodern, not media-specific, but the times, what is your art relevant to this moment we live in versus media specificity? That's my teaching philosophy, both of those things are important.
I'd done plenty of dark stuff and edgy stuff and hardcore stuff, and I kind of found that stuff easy.
People want to be the first with the record, they want to be the first to know which songs are on the record, all that kind of stuff. So I like to just stall them a bit. Personally, I love the idea of an album that's completely new, that no one's heard any free downloads, any pre-record releases, all that kind of stuff, and nothing's been played on the radio. Totally virgin, you know, a sealed record. That's my ideal, but it's very hard to get anybody else to agree to do that.
One reason that we moved into TV is that we love genre. But the genre stuff that we grew up loving wasn't just about jump-scares, it was really about characters.
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