Pirjo Honkasalo Quotes

If you fill your time as a director talking about lights and technique with the crew then it's frightening for the actors to be left alone. Somebody has to keep them safe from the mess that is the machinery.

I think that too often we, film directors, think that a big epic novel and feature film are the same. It's a lie. A feature film is much closer to a short story actually.

Being a female director become as professional as your male colleagues and forget the whole question about being female. You are female anyway and it is going to work in your favor. The scope of female professional superiority can be understood by so few men that mostly they do not miss it.

I had worked in fiction a lot before I started making documentaries, but when I was around 32 or 33-years-old I suddenly got so fed up with the world of fiction, which is so money-centered.

I like to get something that is impossible to verbally order. Sometimes it's something the person is not even conscious of, and it's something you could never ask of them specifically. It's just there.

This is going to sound crazy, especially in America where there is a total inflation of the word "love," but in a sense you have to love the people in front of the camera. There has to be trust between the one who is behind the camera and the people on the other side, so that they can relax. They have to feel they are safe, and that way they don't have to pretend just because they are scared.

At 13 I was someone that didn't have a personality yet. It's a fascinating period in a human life. It's so exciting because you are in between childhood and adulthood.

You give your film away to the audience once it's done. I never look at my films after the premier. The film needs to start its own history.

In all my documentaries I did all the camera work, but in fiction I didn't want to do it myself. I think the machinery is so heavy and demanding that you would leave the actors alone for a long time.

It's said that if two documentary filmmakers meet they talk about the world, if two fiction filmmakers meet they talk about the million that they don't have to make their film.

If you take a big epic novel and you shoot it, when you get to the editing room you notice that it has 2 million climaxes, which fill the whole 90 or 100 minutes. Then you realize you can't cut them out because if somebody is dying and you cut that out it seems like they just disappear from the film.

When I auditioned actors I never make them act. I choose a long symphony, then I tell them to sit down and I play the symphony for them. Then I sit and I look at them. I always pick a piece of music that has up and downs, very dramatic parts, very quiet parts and really sensitive parts so that it can produce different emotions.