Quotes from David Lowery

David Lynch's 'Fire Walk With Me' has a scene in it that scared me so bad that I don't remember it. I blocked the memory out - repeatedly! I've seen the film two or three times, and I can never remember what it is that scares me.

Hindsight is the most dangerous thing imaginable for me. I imagine that's the case for most filmmakers. And I would love to be a filmmaker who was an exception to that rule, but I'm certainly not.

In dialogue scenes, my favorite moments are when people aren't talking because you can cut to the heart of the matter much more quickly, often with a look. People hide things in words. When you don't have words to hide things in, it becomes much more direct and much more immediate of a connection.

'Ain't Them Bodies Saints' wound up becoming a love story even though it was not initially meant to be one.

I think all people are familiar with thinking about their death and trying to come to terms with the fact that we will, at some point, no longer exist. The loss of one's ego is very tough to reconcile with; you really have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to wrap your head around the idea of just not existing anymore.

Dramas are incredibly compelling. I feel like 'Silver Linings Playbook' is a drama, but because it's funny, people market it as a comedy.

My wife and I, we knew each other back in 2001 but had fallen out of touch. One day, I had a dream about her and wrote her a note on Facebook - I was living in L.A. at the time - and that turned into six months of just letter-writing. It started off with Facebook messages and turned into emails and eventually became actual hand-written letters.

There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.

I don't think I'm the best screenwriter in the world. It's just important to me to write my movies so I'm personally invested in them.

So many of my films involve houses or homes that have been abandoned. People trying to get back home. That's an idea that I keep dealing with.

I'm someone who is very sentimental and nostalgic and attached to the homes I lived in, and I think moving is a traumatic experience.

When I was a kid, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, my stuffed animals - they were real. There is the tremendous suspension of disbelief that you have as a child. It's harder as an adult.

I think, with 'St. Nick,' when you're working with a smaller budget, you have fewer risks involved. You're able to take chances with style and content.

I grew up in a deeply Catholic home. Our parents always encouraged us to march to our own drums, though, so some of us are still Catholic and some are not. That's always going to be a part of me though; little bits of it trickle into my work. Whether it's an embrace or a rejection, I'm not always sure, but I can't avoid it.

When you have a lot going on in a scene - whether it be a lot of shots, a lot of coverage, a lot of edits, or just the amount of content - it can cover up a deficit of true feeling. But when you don't have a lot of material to work with, you really have to be sincere with everything. You really have to mean it, because there's nowhere to hide.

In my darkest moments, I have not eaten an entire pie, but I have turned to other baked goods to find solace.

I can't solve a puzzle for the life of me - my brain doesn't work that way. But I can take a very simple idea and extrapolate from it and spend time with it and pull things out of it.

I've never had an actual haunting experience, in the way you might anticipate a ghost in a movie haunting someone, but I do feel presences around me all the time, and I do feel that memories haunt us the way ghosts haunt us or might haunt characters in a film.

I think there is a value in leaving the world a little better off, and movies can do that in a minor way.

I love dialogue, but I'm also terrified of it. In all my movies, I've done my best to cut out as much dialogue as possible. I love the spaces in those silences. Even in 'Pete's Dragon,' I was so happy that the first twenty minutes have about five or six lines of dialogue.

With any movie that gets remade, whether I like the remake or not, I'm glad that I can still go watch the original that I love. If the remake is offering something different, I really value that because I'm having a new experience and adding something new to my life.

The films I love are very precise, and every shot means something; every shot should convey something new.

'Peter Pan' is a beloved property. It's a property that was brought to the screen many, many times before, so one has to not only justify the reasons why one might make a 'Peter Pan' movie in 2018, 2019 or whatever, but you also have to do justice to the source material.

No two people who make a movie on a certain budget scale are going to achieve the same thing because it just depends on what sort of favors you can call, and what sort of dynamics you can pull in the play.