Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world. You're just trying to make a love letter, a gift.

Derek Cianfrance

Categorized in : Character Trying Actors

You can never maintain just pure happiness. In my life, I want full emotion. I want equal parts happiness and sadness.

Derek Cianfrance

sadness emotion want

It happens sometimes that when someone has a camera, they change; sometimes they change for the better.

Derek Cianfrance

change-for-the-better cameras sometimes

I want to get out of the way of the actors. I want to get out of their eye lines. I want to them to stop thinking they're making a movie. I want them to just go and live. It's like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life, and just watch them swim. That's what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.

Derek Cianfrance

eye beautiful thinking

From making documentaries all these years, it doesn't feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I'm always trying to shoot as though it's really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I'm going to be following. I want to follow them. It feels dishonest to be pulling back in that opening shot and leading him to his destiny.

Derek Cianfrance

destiny decision trying

I've had to cut my mom out of a movie before - it's ruthless, editing. But it's also so necessary; because once you start taking away, it's like sculpture, you can really start feeling the shape of the whole.

Derek Cianfrance

cutting mom feelings

I always say writing is like dreaming, shooting is like living, and editing is like murder, because you take all these gifts that actors give you, and you cut them.

Derek Cianfrance

cutting dream writing

I'm so sick of seeing guns in movies, and all this violence; and if there was going to be violence in Pines, I wanted it to actually be narrative violence. I wasn't interested in fetishizing violence in any way of making it feel cool or slow-motion violence. I wanted it to be just violence that affected the story.

Derek Cianfrance

sick violence gun

I love crosscut parallel storytelling, like we did in Blue Valentine. I love how Alejandro González Iñárritu has done it, and Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, and all the way back to D.W. Griffith - this parallel editing is an effective way to tell stories. It's like juggling, like keeping a lot of balls in the air and seeing how they come down.

Derek Cianfrance

valentine storytelling done

Sidney Lumet is one of my favorite filmmakers. I feel like his approach to filmmaking was always so human. He was always making movies about the people. He wasn't about the tricks, you know what I mean? From 12 Angry Men on. Another film of his which I really, really love is Prince of the City, with Treat Williams, which is kind of a lost classic. Lumet is one of those film heroes that changed movies for everyone.

Derek Cianfrance

hero love-is mean

When I made my student film, a feature, nobody wanted to talk to me and I was, like, in the desert for 12 years.

Derek Cianfrance

talk-to-me film students

Yeah as the director I consider myself to be the coach, and my actors are my players. So I have to show them how committed I am, but I also want to lead by example. I think whenever you make a film, you start out alone, and then slowly start - you have to be a magnet. You have to attract people to you, to the project.

Derek Cianfrance

player people thinking

So I don't think being an artist you can ever satisfy - the moment you do get satisfied is the moment you're done, really. I'm actually starting to bug out now, because it's not enough. I get joy and pleasure in the movies out there in the world that people are seeing, but for me, it's about making it. That's why I do it, is to make it, to deal with my life.

Derek Cianfrance

artist people thinking

I feel like the job in editing is to let the movie tell you what it is. It's like sculpture. You just start taking away, you add a nose here, you cut off like the side of the cheek over here in the crease and you have a face. But it really reveals to you what it means to be over time, and if you have enough time.

Derek Cianfrance

cutting enough mean

I don't really collect anything. I grew up in a family that collected things and then they'd get sick and people die and then they have their basements full of stuff that goes from one box to the next, so I try not to get sentimental with stuff. I just try to collect memories.

Derek Cianfrance

sick memories people

There's something so glorious in giving control to the world. I think that's what I'm trying to do in my films-control the world but also let it be chaotic, let there be life.

Derek Cianfrance

trying giving thinking

There's one rule that I have on my movies, which is that anything that you want to do, you can do. But! There's a flip side to that, which is that anything I want you to do, give it a try also.

Derek Cianfrance

want trying giving

I tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.

Derek Cianfrance

surprise actors giving

A lawyer actually has to see all sides of a situation. Lawyers actually might be the most understanding human beings.

Derek Cianfrance

understanding sides might

With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.

Derek Cianfrance

looking me character people

I love people that work with passion and love. When you make choices that way, there's reverberations, consequences. That's what I'm interested in, that echo, that ripple of choice.

Derek Cianfrance

you passion work love