Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

When I was a kid, I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war, and the other was that my parents would get a divorce; and when I was twenty, they split up, and I just felt like I needed to confront all those things that scared me as a kid - entering young adulthood and trying to have relationships.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

Every moment is, in some ways, eternal. Once you put something into the world, it stays there.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

I love people that work with passion and love. When you make choices that way, there's reverberations, consequences. That's what I'm interested in, that echo, that ripple of choice.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

I shot 'Blue Valentine' on 16mm for the past, and for the present on the Red Camera. I feel that both formats are valid. The stories should dictate the format we shoot on. Filmmakers should have a choice.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

I have kids. I can't hardly watch an afternoon football game with them without having to turn off the TV during the commercials. It's too much. I don't know when violence was deemed such a cinematic thing.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

As a writer, I always peel back the layers, go to the most sensitive places uncomfortably close to the heart.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

After 'Place Beyond the Pines,' honestly, I was sick of myself. Sick of my own ideas. I wanted to do an adaptation, but everything I'd been reading, I just didn't understand it.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

I ask all my actors to do two things: I ask them to fail for me, and I ask them to surprise me.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

When I cast great actors, I try to make extraordinary people ordinary, dealing with these extremely small intimate details of interpersonal relationships against an epic backdrop.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone's scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that's how I write.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

I think 'GoodFellas' is just a perfect film. From an efficiency of storytelling standpoint, from an entertainment standpoint, from a performance standpoint, from a use of music standpoint, from a cinematography and editing standpoint - to me, it's just a perfect movie.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

I was a member of the VHS generation. I used to study movies as a kid because I had a VCR and could record a movie on HBO and just watch it repeatedly.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

We had all these smiley family pictures all over the walls of my house, but I always found those pictures to be odd because we weren't smiling all the time. I don't want to paint the picture of a total dysfunctional house, but there were a lot of arguments in that house. A lot of pain.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

There's one rule that I have on my movies, which is that anything that you want to do, you can do. But! There's a flip side to that, which is that anything I want you to do, give it a try also.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

There's something so glorious in giving control to the world. I think that's what I'm trying to do in my films - control the world but also let it be chaotic, let there be life.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

I love actors that are brave, that are courageous. And courage to me is not the absence of fear, it's the presence of fear, and they go to places that really scare them, because as an audience, that's where you feel danger.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

I'm trying to be the coach. My actors are my players. They're doing things that I'm too cowardly to do myself.

Derek Cianfrance
Derek Cianfrance

Lars Ulrich, he was my hero growing up. I wanted to be like him. I played the drums.