I've always spent a lot of time in movie theaters, kind of absorbing anything I can. I just love sitting in the dark, and watching the flickering image up there. Just sitting in a movie theater alone is inspiring to me. It takes a pretty bad movie to drain the magic out of that - but Lord knows, those movies exist.
Andrew BujalskiI've always spent a lot of time in movie theaters, kind of absorbing anything I can. I just love sitting in the dark, and watching the flickering image up there. Just sitting in a movie theater alone is inspiring to me. It takes a pretty bad movie to drain the magic out of that - but Lord knows, those movies exist.
Andrew BujalskiWriting a story starts out as a puzzle in your mind, of "What is it I'm fantasizing about right now that makes me think this is going to be worth years of work?" And you just keep pushing and trying to figure it out, and once you've hit on these resonances... Then as a screenwriter, it can be dangerous if you get too hooked on just finding things that resonate with each other, because then you risk getting into stuff that's too neat, and becomes stifled as storytelling. But you do feel like you're on the right track when you start to have a sense of what goes with what.
Andrew BujalskiIt just kind of continues to be strange and interesting to me to try to understand what other people are looking for. And this also just comes from getting older. You look at the stuff certainly that's coming out of Hollywood these days, and you go, "Did what came out of Hollywood when I was a kid make more sense, or was it just that I was in the demographic then?" But I certainly feel increasingly confused and disconnected from it.
Andrew BujalskiI suppose it's nice that I've made films that some people have heard of and respect. That's great. And it's certainly helpful in some regards, but they're really tough economic prospects. They always have been, and that's not necessarily getting any better. And not just the films, but it's also been a rough 10 years for that independent film market. And so I have stumbled onto this point in the timeline where the kind of stuff that I'm trying to do is not... it was a lot easier to know what to do with it 20 years ago.
Andrew BujalskiThere's nothing sillier than fake rough edges, like the handheld camera you sometimes see on "NYPD Blue," shaking and jittering around, unmotivated, way more than any actual documentary camera would.
Andrew BujalskiI think a lot of people go into filmmaking thinking, "How can I make a career?" And so when they make their first film, they make it thinking, "Well, this'll be the one that gets me to the place where I can make the second film the way I want to make it, and that'll get me to the place where I can make $100 million on the third film." And I thought, "Well, if I put sustainability at the bottom of my priority list, then what opportunities is that going to free me up to pursue?" And that's what I've always done.
Andrew Bujalski