Quotes from Sebastian Lelio

We all have a potential revolutionary energy inside.

Film is a game of projections upon projections, and the projected image on the screen is a game of light and shadows. There is nothing there; it is the brain that is decoding those things. The film doesn't have any decipherable kind of meaning if it's not seen.

Those of us who make movies play with perception and reality; those who watch our films are responsible for making sense of it.

Cinema is empathy machinery, and we multiply our life experience through cinema. When it is good cinema, it almost counts as a personal experience.

This idea of walls, segregation, labels, and 'You against us' and 'We are superior and you are inferior.' Which people are legitimate? Which relationships are legitimate or not? Who declares that under which authority? These are things that are hugely important.

Casting is an art, and if you're interested in people, like I am, casting is essential.

I was writing when I was very young, and then I became interested in everything - I wanted to do photography. I wanted to act. I wanted to write plays, and then I wanted to film and to paint, but I felt that film had a condition that reunites everything.

I wanted to be a poet. I wrote from ages 15 to 22, but I left it because I discovered, and fell in love with, cinema.

I don't believe in closed scripts; I think that they should be open.

I grew up surrounded by strong women, and that was a very strong influence.

The use of music in 'Gloria' is not cynical.

I grew up in a dictatorship in a very Catholic country.

Death is astute as a master. It's a process that teaches people aspects of themselves.

I didn't know how I was going to deal with 'Disobedience' because it takes place in such a specific and often secretive world.

I'm always trying to get my characters to the point of complete rebelliousness. I like that attitude that characters feel when they own their lives. There's something beautiful in the moments when characters disobey.

I don't come from a rich family, but my parents are professionals.

The idea behind 'Gloria' was to take a secondary character - the aunt, the mother - and stay with her as she becomes our protagonist.

Either we learn to live together and embrace the complexity of life, or we will end up with fascism again and destroy ourselves.

Creative processes are always very opaque. Afterwards, you tend to pretend that everything was planned and it was a strategy, but it was not like that at all.

'Gloria' was a gamble.

The living experience of film only happens when a film is seen, and only within the spectator, because they project their own fears, desires, and fantasies upon those lights and shadows.

I was always making new friends, then losing them.

When you're filming, not everything is rational.

In Latin America, cinema has always been a bourgeois activity, I guess, as it is everywhere. It's just a stupidly expensive art form, and there is nothing you can do about it.