Riley Stearns

“I grew up lower-middle class outside of Austin, I'm a white guy, and I write movies.”

“My perspective is a white man's perspective and nothing else. I can't speak for anyone else or say something I'm not versed in.”

“Jujitsu helped me a lot in feeling more comfortable with who I was.”

“For me, I never look down at my characters.”

“I think violence should be a bit much sometimes because I don't like glorifying violence.”

“I'll admit I'm still getting used to using preferred pronouns here and there. Actually changing the way that you address people can be a challenge. It's not from a place of not understanding, but conditioning.”

“I went to UT in Austin for a year as an undeclared liberal arts student. After that year I applied to the film program but didn't get in so I dropped out and moved out to L.A.”

“I'm definitely not making movies solely for myself. That's something that I hear people say in the past, all they care about is that they like what they're making. They don't care what other people think. I think that's a disservice to the project and to the people that are working on it.”

“I don't want to think I'm making fun of anything ever, especially my characters.”

“I always wanted to learn French or Italian growing up. I love the romantic sound of those languages.”

“'Faults,' in a lot of ways, is still is a heightened film, but the end of the day, it's the real world. It's in '86, is the arbitrary date that I've set. And so I went about it in a more realistic way.”

“I play bass, and I wanted to be a musician.”

“Cinematically speaking, there's more of a striking appeal to karate. It's kicking and punching action. Jiu-jitsu is dudes rolling around and wrestling.”

“Sometimes I wonder how my filmmaking would have been affected by film school but in the end I'm glad I got to figure it out on my own.”

“I was really interested in doing a martial arts movie, but maybe exploring ideas that maybe you wouldn't think to explore in a martial arts movie.”

“When everyone decides that they have to be a certain way, that there's one way to be a man and one way to be a woman, that's when we go down the wrong path.”

“Tattoos are traditionally super masculine, but I just like it. I like the art.”

“I go back home for Christmas every year. Inevitably, somebody from my family will say, 'How's the karate going?' I've told them a million times I do jiu-jitsu, but it's always, 'This is Riley. He does karate.' They're very different art forms!”

“I don't plan a lot of shots, but going into shooting and prep, I've got certain things that stand out to me.”

“I love making movies that I want to see made and I want to see on the screen, but I also want to make movies that people enjoy and want to watch.”