Don Hertzfeldt Quotes

I've loved science fiction my whole life. But I've never made a science fiction movie.

Tuesday's coming, did you bring your coat?

So much of the writing is not conscious, in the sense that it's not calculated. I remember in film school we had so many studies with big fancy words where you could dissect a movie and make charts of all of the characters' complicated inner relations and themes and what does this mean? And it's overwhelming as a student. It's great for a student, but as a writer, it's paralyzing.

After working so long on something like this, it's great to go out and meet people and see the reactions and remind yourself that, oh, yeah,, I wasn't just working in a cave by myself for no reason...

But I had never drawn on a tablet before. I've been doing pencil and paper and film for almost 20 years. I wanted to try something different. I wanted to teach myself some digital stuff in advance of a bigger feature project that's coming up, and I took to it really quickly.

To me, that's where memories are very interesting because what happens when we start losing memories? What happens when you can't take your memories with you? Who are we without our memories, without our past?

I frequently run into this, where I genuinely feel like - and this is not just my head cold talking right now - I often, and this is going to sound weird, but I often feel like the guy who makes these movies is smarter than me. Smarter than the guy on the phone right now.

Maybe the most annoying questions is: "Where do you see yourself in so many years?" It's a terrifying answer no matter how you think of it.

Time travel is a thing. It can be very dangerous, and it's also very - it's an expensive thing to do.

I still have the same outlook on things that I did 10, 20 years ago. As an animator, there’s no career path that you can follow; there’s very few people doing this that you can look to and pinpoint the mistakes. It hasn’t changed since I was little. You have interests and follow them and strange things happen, organically or not.

Most people's personalities and roles are locked by the time they're nine or 10. I think there's something to that.

It's great for me to hear those different reactions because when I travel with a movie like this [World of Tommorow], it's very similar. You'll hear a line in one city get a big laugh, and then in another city, the same line kind of gets a gasp, and that's wonderful.

Usually the more money that something takes to make, the less interesting it's forced to become.

I'd love to start some movements. What I'm tired of is irony, and sarcasm, and music/movies/what have you, not having the guts to mean anything.

I've loved science fiction my whole life. But I've never made a science fiction movie. And it's [World Of Tomorrow] sort of a parody of science fiction at the same time. It's all of the things I find interesting in sci-fi amplified.

There's really no reason film and digital can't happily co-exist and benefit from one another. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to sell you something.

The only purpose of the visuals, in any film, is to serve the story.

It's one of those things that if I was smart enough to explain it in words, I wouldn't have had to make a movie "World Of Tomorrow" out of it. It's a love letter to science fiction.

The design is a really flat primary color with all sorts of abstract geometric shapes, just implying something. And then you'd have your characters running from something with guns. It was very expressionistic.

What's interesting is when you talk about that - "living forever" or as long as you possibly can - what you really want is a continuance of your memories and your experiences. If I said you could live another 200 years, but we'd have to reboot you, that's not attractive. Nobody wants that as much as a continuance of your experience.

I'm still learning. I've never done a digital project before. And I'm pretty sure I did things to the software that weren't supposed to be done.

I've never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it [animation drawing].

When you get questions that annoy you the art is answering them differently. If you're bored with it, then everyone will be bored with it.

I'm a bit of a weird creature... I'm self taught and went to a regular film school, not art school, and I think it's unusual for somebody to approach animation from that angle. In a sense I've sometimes consclassered myself more of a filmmaker who just happens to animate.

Traditionally, digital projects, when you project them, they get really washed out. It's complicated stuff with gamma, but basically your blacks get very milky and the colors get very weak, and we made so many different versions of it to just pump more color into it, so it would look just as good in the theater as it does on your screen at home. And color was my constant whine. It needed to be very oversaturated.

I'll have a sentence in my head that's kind of beautiful and interesting, but I'm not sure why or where it's coming from. So it's kind of funny, because when people point out patterns or themes, it's the exact opposite of my film school experience.

Both the writing and the visuals in that sense are very exploratory. It goes back to my rule for myself [in] making it.

I think one of the reasons I love science fiction so much is that it's - when it's ideally done right, it's a reflection on ourselves.

I have friends and illustrators who can't stand drawing on the Cintiq. [A graphic pad tablet used by digital animators] There's a certain tension and friction when you draw on paper that they miss. The tablet is very slick. It's like drawing on glass. But that didn't bother me at all.

If you go to a film festival and watch a bunch of features and then watch a bunch of shorts, you will almost always find that the shorts are where people are taking more risks and pushing more boundaries...simply because they have much less to lose.

It's naturally kind of humiliating and strange to have a microphone; when you're young you just make movies, you don't worry about all the peripheral stuff that comes with it.

Fighting a cold, but I'm powering through. As they say, there's nothing better for a cold than doing interviews all day.

I've got the luxury of being able to work largely alone, so I don't need to communicate difficult creative classeas to other people and can leave the whole thing in my head or on scattered notes and sketches that only I need to understand. So I can very radically and quickly change things as I go without tripping anybody else up. And the camera allows me to experiment and try new things on the fly.

If an audience finds themselves paying attention to how you made your film, you're sunk because that means they're unplugged from your story. What matters is what's unfolding on the screen, not how you put it there. It doesn't matter if it's red triangles or million dollar software if the audience doesn't care.

To be animating at the same time, it's the ultimate freedom in filmmaking because you can literally put anything on the screen that you can imagine.

To me everyone goes through that at some point in adolescence, you know. There's - you meet someone when you're a young teenager, and they're never right for you, and you always wind up hurting someone on the way to figuring out all this stuff. But it was a fun writing process.

I think some of this just feels right. You're in the shower and you come up with a sentence and it's beautiful. You don't know how it's going to fit in the film, but you put it in because it feels right. This is a very long way of saying, so much of it is me feeling like I'm catching ideas rather than coming up with ideas. It's very fluid like that.

No matter what decade science fiction comes from, it's representing the present.

You have to leave the window open for better classes to come along as you go. You can't grow too proud of your script. You have to let the thing shape itself. It guarantees the best classes will always be used and it also keeps you from going braindead. If you grow bored and uninspired working on something, the audience will be able to tell.