You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.
Interpretation
Embrace the depth of art rather than forcing it to conform to your understanding.
This quote by Steven Soderbergh emphasizes the importance of allowing art to challenge and expand our perspectives instead of trying to limit it to our existing understanding. It suggests that true appreciation of art requires an open mind that seeks to grow and adapt rather than one that forces simplifications onto creative expressions.
In practice
In an art class, when discussing a challenging piece, one might say, 'Remember, you’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, not the other way around.'
If you talk to any filmmaker, and if you said to them, 'I guarantee you x amount of money per month for the rest of your life, and it's not a big amount of money, but I can also guarantee that you will work continually, you will get to make what you want to make,' any filmmaker on the planet will make that kind of deal. I would have made it.
When people say that moviegoing is dead, I go, 'OK, so the makers of 'Get Out' should've sold that movie to a platform? Then they don't have this insane, crazy success theatrically all over the world.'
I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.
Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.
Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.
A success, to me, is the ability to keep working. That's success. It has nothing to do with money; it's the ability to keep getting things made, period.
I'm a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.
Music is a powerful tool in galvanizing people around an issue. There's no better way to get your point across than to put it in a beautiful song.
When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.
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