You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.
Interpretation
The impact of a film goes beyond its creation; it is shaped by the individual interpretations of its audience.
This quote emphasizes that the true essence of a film is not solely defined by the editing process or the director's vision, but rather by the way it resonates with and is interpreted by each viewer. Every person's unique perspective contributes to a diverse array of meanings, making the experience of watching a film a collaborative and personal journey that varies from one individual to another.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of films on audiences after a screening event.
If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.
I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.
We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.
People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.
I see my finished platinum print (in the viewfinder) in all its desired qualities, before my exposure.
Music comes from the musician, not the instrument.
Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.
Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.
Writers don't always know what they mean - that's why they write. Their work stands in for them. On the page, the reader meets the authoritative, perfected self; in life, the writer is lumbered with the uncertain, imperfect one.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.