If you compromise what you're trying to do just a little bit, you'll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you're suddenly really far away from where you're trying to go.
Spike JonzeRead
Movies, they take years of my life, so I'm fortunate that I get to work in a lot of different mediums.
Interpretation
Spike Jonze reflects on the time and effort invested in filmmaking while appreciating his versatility as an artist.
In this quote, Spike Jonze expresses the intense dedication and duration that filmmaking demands, which can often feel like a significant sacrifice of his lifeβs time. However, he also acknowledges his gratitude for the opportunity to explore and work in various artistic mediums, which allows him to channel his creativity in diverse ways beyond just movies.
In practice
In a speech at a film festival to inspire young filmmakers.
If you compromise what you're trying to do just a little bit, you'll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you're suddenly really far away from where you're trying to go.
Whenever I start writing, I try to put together songs that feed the feeling of the movie.
I want to make films without a single clear message, and films that are as close as possible to what it feels like to be alive. At least to me.
I think if something's emotionally real - and I'm not even talking about in movies or in art, but in life - you can't really argue with that, even if your intellectual mind might know differently.
When I'm making stuff, the thing that excites me most is not the result, but the process and trying to do something I've never done before.
I think at the beginning of a project, you decide if you're in love with the idea and what it's about, or what you think it's about at that time at least. Then you commit to it, and once you've commit to it no matter what, no matter how many self doubts you have, you're in it. The ship's sailed, you can't turn around.
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.
You live the life of a dancer. It is not your job, it is your life, and you have to love it so much to be able to take it every day for six days a week, sometimes seven.
Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
Painting is neither decorative amusement, nor the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that's where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don't come home your best self.
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