Daniel Espinosa

“I'm a great bum, and I'm a pretty good director.”

“I come from the working-class area of Stockholm, and I grew up with Serbian and Chilean people.”

“We've all done actions in our lives where we compromise what we believe in. And if we keep doing it, there's no way back, no pride to hold on to.”

“I run a fast pace on my sets, man. I like the energy of the scene to be the energy on the set. I think it affects the actors, and I think it affects the crew. There's that sensation like you're really shooting it for real, like in a documentary.”

“Think about Medusa, with the snakes. If you shoot a movie in Europe, the financiers are three snakes, and they all have opinions. In Hollywood there are, like, 20 snakes.”

“When I was sixteen years old, I was sentenced to two years in prison; the Swedish government changed it, so I could go to a boarding school as part of a social programme. I was in this boarding school with some of the richest kids in Sweden.”

“I have severe claustrophobia, and I panic if I'm more than six feet above ground.”

“I made this Swedish movie called 'Snabba Cash,' or 'Easy Money,' and it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival. A lot of American studios, agents, and people like that saw it there and liked it.”

“I think the movie industry is a hard industry, but it is not that hard to be allowed to do what you want if you work hard.”

“If the crew is hit by the situation that we're trying to portray, I think we get a real and a stronger moment with the camerawork and the actors.”

“When you're 16, the top of the world is directing a gangster movie.”

“Almost always, when we have fights in movies, they're done in these strange rooms where nothing gets broken. It's almost like they're in padded cells.”

“That's the place we're in right now: we think we have the capability to get every piece of information, and we don't. We don't know what's going on behind the closed curtain. If we want to say we live in a free democratic society, we should be able to find out whatever we want to.”

“For me, it's important that the script is good. Then a good director will want to make it.”

“Do we have the right to understand the world we live in? The right to all the information regarding why our governments are making the decisions that they are?”

“I want to challenge my cinematography and my editing.”

“I did two movies that were arthouse movies; they were critically successful but made no money at all... but after making those movies, I thought, 'I wouldn't watch my own movies when I was 16, and my buddies where I came from wouldn't watch my movies, because they were boring.'”

“Chileans have this rumor that they're great soccer players, but I stunk as a soccer player. I always had to hide my nationality when they were picking teams because, just by the look of me, they would think that I was a great soccer player.”

“If you just storyboard something, you've already planned it, and you're stuck in the limitations of your imagination.”

“Gangster movies are the inheritor of the Greek tragedy: it's the only genre where the audience will be disappointed if there's not a tragic ending.”