Pirjo Honkasalo Quotes

I think that too often we, film directors, think that a big epic novel and feature film are the same. It's a lie. A feature film is much closer to a short story actually.

When I make a documentary I shoot very little but I hang around with my camera for a long time. I look at the people for a long time through the loop and then when I see something interested then I shoot. I think that I have become very sensitive to these things.

At 13 I was someone that didn't have a personality yet. It's a fascinating period in a human life. It's so exciting because you are in between childhood and adulthood.

I like to get something that is impossible to verbally order. Sometimes it's something the person is not even conscious of, and it's something you could never ask of them specifically. It's just there.

It's said that if two documentary filmmakers meet they talk about the world, if two fiction filmmakers meet they talk about the million that they don't have to make their film.

There is one thing where people are always right. It is when they are describing what they have been feeling when watching your film. You cannot say: No, you did not feel like that!

The cinematography was of course incredibly important to me because I graduated as a cinematographer.

I had worked in fiction a lot before I started making documentaries, but when I was around 32 or 33-years-old I suddenly got so fed up with the world of fiction, which is so money-centered.

Every documentary is subjective. It's a total lie to say there are objective documentaries.

When I auditioned actors I never make them act. I choose a long symphony, then I tell them to sit down and I play the symphony for them. Then I sit and I look at them. I always pick a piece of music that has up and downs, very dramatic parts, very quiet parts and really sensitive parts so that it can produce different emotions.

In all my documentaries I did all the camera work, but in fiction I didn't want to do it myself. I think the machinery is so heavy and demanding that you would leave the actors alone for a long time.

I went to film school when I was 17, and of course when you are very young you think that there is nothing else in the world except film. At some point I started getting hungry to see something else. For five years I didn't make any films, I was traveling around the world, writing for newspapers, working in theater, working in opera, I thought I would never return to film.

This is going to sound crazy, especially in America where there is a total inflation of the word "love," but in a sense you have to love the people in front of the camera. There has to be trust between the one who is behind the camera and the people on the other side, so that they can relax. They have to feel they are safe, and that way they don't have to pretend just because they are scared.

If you fill your time as a director talking about lights and technique with the crew then it's frightening for the actors to be left alone. Somebody has to keep them safe from the mess that is the machinery.

I went to England when I was 13-years=old and then I went again when I was 14. When I went for the second time I felt like the first summer I was there it was a waste because I didn't exist yet.

If you take a big epic novel and you shoot it, when you get to the editing room you notice that it has 2 million climaxes, which fill the whole 90 or 100 minutes. Then you realize you can't cut them out because if somebody is dying and you cut that out it seems like they just disappear from the film.

We exaggerate the difference between documentary and fiction. I think that on some level a fiction film is also a documentary on the actors. You can't wash away your life's history, which is written on your face, unless you get a facelift.

I don't think the concept of "directing actors" exists in the sense that if you get what you order from an actor you'll always get bad acting. Every actor is scared just like a regular person.

Being a female director become as professional as your male colleagues and forget the whole question about being female. You are female anyway and it is going to work in your favor. The scope of female professional superiority can be understood by so few men that mostly they do not miss it.

You give your film away to the audience once it's done. I never look at my films after the premier. The film needs to start its own history.

As my films are born at the moment when they are reflected into another person's mind and memories, there are no misconceptions. I totally accept that different people have seen a different film.