Shane Carruth

“Film is a collaborative process, absolutely, but I am a control freak.”

“I never got into 'MacGyver,' but 'All the President's Men' and 'The Conversation' were big for me.”

“I believe that filmmakers have to internalize the story and subtext so well that all of the departments can start to speak to each other - that music can speak to cinematography can speak to writing and back again.”

“From a completely financial standpoint, digital is starting to crack as far as an independent filmmaker's access to getting your story out there - Amazon, iTunes, all of those. It makes the prospect of doing it yourself - not easy by any means - but possible, maybe for the first time.”

“I'm only interested in science fiction that's used as a literary device, a shortcut into something more exploratory or universal about our experience. That's why I think it was invented and why mythology was invented; it's a tool, not an end to itself.”

“I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.”

“Whether you are liberal or conservative, people seem to know the talking points for whatever the issue of the day is. Very rarely does it seem like these are opinions that people are coming up with themselves; it's like they watched the right cable news channel, and now they know what they are supposed to think, and they repeat that.”

“I got a degree in math, from not a good school in Texas, and then I went to work as a software engineer. Just not glamorous at all.”

“Probably the TV show I've watched the most is 'How It's Made' on the History Channel. I could watch 24 hours of 'How It's Made' and never get bored.”

“There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.”

“In school, when I got into upper-level math, there would be times when I would wake up from a dream and have - not an answer, exactly, but a direction to pursue. My writing has always been like that. I wake up from dreams knowing which direction to go in.”

“I don't read books on how to write screenplays just because I'm stubborn. So it's all sort of made up.”

“My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.”

“I have a really, really hard time sitting down and watching a TV show, except I'm apparently willing to watch the same episode of 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,' like, seven times.”

“All I know is that as an audience member, I am less and less inclined to go to the theater.”

“I've heard stories about movies that are really maybe difficult and really dramatic and good, but they are being sold as romantic comedies. All it's going to do is just... that's hurting the work, because that just makes it impossible for anyone to see it correctly.”

“Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they're about, I probably wouldn't be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what's at the heart of a film.”

“I love to work. It's the idea of having someone else tell you how to make your film or how to sell it - that's the part I can't really deal with. I would rather do 1,000 things that are work than deal with one thing that's a political problem.”

“I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, 'Well, that's emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.' I have difficulty thinking that's the way we experience things.”

“I love the concept of the romance that exists when people are broken. Like, the promise of a romance when you're at the bottom. I think that's infinitely compelling and romantic.”