Hirokazu Quotes & Sayings

Life is a cracked surface at best. Fiction is a nice edifice. / every word/sentence/paragraph gives a writer an opportunity to reinforce or deliberately crack the edifice by screwing with meaning, structure, grammar, the fourth wall, etc. / different types and degrees of cracking produce different arrangements of order and chaos. — K.J. Bishop

It does a man good to see his lady being brave while she has their baby ... it inspires him. — Ina May Gaskin

Life is a blessing remeber to stop and take a breath every once in a while or it will pass you by. — Adele Tack

I don't really believe in regrets. — Wayne Newton

the preferable way to treat one another is with love and kindness; that pursuit of material gain is ultimately empty when measured against eternity; and that somehow, as human beings, we are all connected spiritually. — Christopher Moore

The biggest considerations I had were practical: how do you move such a large number of actors around a small space? So, for example, if I have to have the mother bring a pot of tea from the kitchen to the living room and serve it to the others, how do I, on a practical level, get everyone into the frame? Any decisions I made about the camera angles or movement came out of necessity, versus any sort of stylistic choice. — Hirokazu Koreeda

To pay homage to beauty is to admire Nature; to admire Nature is to worship God — Epictetus

One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change. — Hirokazu Koreeda

In order to avoid sentimentality and to be able to write the screenplay with the kind of humor and irony necessary to keep the story moving, I needed to distance myself as much as I could from the characters, to try to get to a point where I could view them objectively. — Hirokazu Koreeda

In the neighborhood around Waseda, there were all these movie theaters, so every morning I left the house and watched movies instead of going to class. The experience of encountering films then is one of my greatest memories. Before that I'd never paid any attention to directors, but there I was taking a crash course in Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, Truffaut, Renoir, Fellini. Because I've always been naturally a more introspective person, I was more interested in becoming a screenwriter than a director. — Hirokazu Koreeda

The contemporary Japanese directors who are well-known in the West - say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase - are mostly unknown to Japanese, particularly of the younger generation. — Hirokazu Koreeda

I don't believe in making movies to cater to a foreign audience. You never know what the reaction is going to be anyhow. At the time I made Maborosi, the Japanese movies getting any foreign attention were all period dramas and seemed to be about some representative element of Japanese life, and my movie was contemporary movie about one specific woman trying to understand her husband's suicide. — Hirokazu Koreeda

But then foreign critics right away made sweeping comparisons to haiku, noh theater, and directors like Ozu, as if the movie were somehow representative of Japan - which was, well, not what I was after. Similarly, with After Life, I deliberately set out to make a movie that was unlike what I imagined the foreign conception of Japan to be, and I figured non-Japanese wouldn't find it interesting at all. — Hirokazu Koreeda

What is technically called the 'fungibility' of money, is its chief value as an article of commerce; and this fact could not long remain recognized, even by such a conservative class as legal officials. — Edward Jenks

Films need people more than stories.
Landscapes also harbor emotions.
Music can blow like the wind through a scene. — Hirokazu Koreeda

If a movie is nominated for, say, an Academy award, that movie will instantly become popular in Japan. There's always been a bit of a complex the Japanese have about being taken seriously in the West. — Hirokazu Koreeda

Inner guidance is heard like soft music in the night by those who have learned to listen. — Vernon Howard

As far as documentaries go, I believe unreservedly that they serve an important function in our culture. I'd love to be able to make both documentaries and feature films simultaneously, but so far that hasn't happened. — Hirokazu Koreeda

It has been a difficult road this year, but still I look at every day as a new opportunity. — Michael Chang

We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one's entire attention is devoted to it. — Leo Tolstoy

Bros before hoes," said Jared. "By which of course I mean gardening tools, because I hold all the fine ladies of Sorry-in-the-Vale in the highest regard. — Sarah Rees Brennan

What's going on? Not much. My mother's falling to pieces, my sister is a selfish bitch and my father's committing slow suicide for sake of his kingdom. That's all. — Karen Miller

I did want to become a novelist, but the program at Waseda was pretty intense in terms of language requirements - two hours of English and four hours of Chinese. I thought, what do I need this for? So I stopped going to class. — Hirokazu Koreeda