“The more you’re able to project your own world upon the work, the more power it has.” – Peter Chung
Talk about sacrificing for your art—this, from Chinese film director, Zhang Yimou:
Q: There is a famous story about how you bought your first camera. Is it true? How did you buy that first camera?
A: Back then, I didn’t have much money. I could save only five Yuan every month, after putting aside money for eating and basic living expenses. I really liked taking pictures, and wanted to own my own camera. But to buy a camera at that time, you needed to have at least 188 Yuan, or more than twenty U.S. dollars � a lot of money for me back then! I knew it would take me two to three years to save enough money to buy one. I had already saved for more than a year but it was far from enough. But during that period, it was also possible for people to donate their blood for money. So I decided to do that! I donated my blood to augment my savings. It took many months but I finally had enough money to afford my first-ever camera. That was in November or December of 1974, I still remember. With that new camera I began shooting photographs. So I guess you could say that was my first contact with the movie industry!
Another interview with film directors Zach Niles and Banker White, of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars:
When you’re a refugee, you’re separated from your family and your country, and so a large part of who you are is your cultural identity, and music is a carrier of culture, of who you are, and a means of expressing yourself.
This, too, from the same site—an interview with Anders �stergaard, who directed autobiographical film, “Tintin and I”:
On another level, I think this film is also about growing up, because Herg� took a long time to grow up. As a young man he thought he had struck a deal with the world that if he just kept on drawing, and if he just stuck to his Catholic, right-wing environment, then everybody would leave him alone and he could just stay in his imaginary worlds. But eventually the world crept in on him. Reality forced its way into his life, first in terms of the Second World War, then in terms of love, because he fell in love with the wrong woman. So “Tintin and I,” in which he talks about his life, is a very long story about growing up and facing the music, facing the choices you have to make in life in order to become yourself.
And here, this 1971 article from Vonnegut, on Torture and Blubber:
When I was a young reader of Robin Hood tales and “The White Company” by Arthur Conan Doyle and so on, I came across the verb “blubber” so often that I looked it up. Bad people in the stories did it when good people punished them hard. It means, of course, to weep noisily and without constraint. No good person in a story ever did that. But it is not easy in real life to make a healthy man blubber, no matter how wicked he may be.
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