Top 94 David Russell Quotes
#1. Anything you could ever want or be you already have and are.
David O. Russell
#2. The religion itself may have some great ideas, but I can't take it seriously if it's blatantly exclusionary.
David O. Russell
#3. I suppose what I like about Zen is that the teachers are constantly questioning your insight and challenging it, looking for sloppiness or laziness in it, and ways you can go past that.
David O. Russell
#4. The closer you stay to emotional authenticity and people, character authenticity, the less you can go wrong. That's how I feel now, no matter what you're doing.
David O. Russell
#5. The holy trifecta of directing and filmmaking is character emotion, camera movement and music. When you hit those three, that's magical. That's what I'm trying to do.
David O. Russell
#6. That's the most beautiful thing that I like about boxing: you can take a punch. The biggest thing about taking a punch is your ego reacts and there's no better spiritual lesson than trying to not pay attention to your ego's reaction. That's what takes people out of the fight half the time.
David O. Russell
#7. They call David O. Russell the actor whisperer because he can get stuff out of actors that maybe some other directors can't.
Jacki Weaver
#8. David O. Russell's best films are thrilling high wire acts that run the moment to moment risk of tumbling to the ground. In his latest, "Joy," Russell has more trouble than usual keeping his balance on the wire.
David O. Russell
#9. I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.
David O. Russell
#10. I got a nomination for director, which means the world to me; it's just the most exciting thing for me and my family. You do the good hard work, and the rest of it is something you shouldn't get too caught up in, but when it happens - boy! I respect it.
David O. Russell
#11. The investigation of consciousness has come to be regarded suspiciously by most smart people and by most scientists. That's a legacy that began with the Inquisition, which considered non-Christian spiritual inquiry as blasphemous.
David O. Russell
#12. Sadly, this picture [ Joy] does not go from strength to strength. It sinks into a morass of tedious obstacles to this woman's success. Joy the person may be able to surmount all barriers, but the film with her name on it is not so fortunate.
David O. Russell
#13. I've done my best to work from a place of humility - always looking over your shoulder saying, 'Does this suck?' and I think that's a good way to work. The other way to work is where you start to think, 'I'm on fire, I'm amazing!' and I don't think that's the way to work.
David O. Russell
#14. That's what takes people out of the fight half the time. They get hit and half the reaction is your ego is saying, 'I cannot believe that person just lit me up - how humiliating.'
David O. Russell
#15. Every director's so different. Everybody has their own modus operandi and I love getting to know different directors in the way they work. David O. Russell is very exciting to be with because he's got a mind like quicksilver.
Jacki Weaver
#16. When I sit down to write, I don't think, 'OK, what is the next David O. Russell film I can write, or what is Harvey Weinstein going to want to buy?' Or even, 'What are filmgoers going to want.' I try to think, tell a good story. Just do what you do.
Matthew Quick
#17. And that is also what the movie's about, going beyond success, what is success 'cause I think success is misperceived as just a cake and it isn't. There is many things inside that success. There's a maturity and a heartbreak and sadness and broken glass.
David O. Russell
#19. I pluck with my fingernails. If I break a nail, I can't cancel a concert. So I can make a nail out of a ping-pong ball.
David Russell
#20. A thousand years ago, scientists who wondered about consciousness and the nature of reality were burned at the stake. We still haven't recovered from that and it's left us with a culture that no longer investigates consciousness, except on the fringes.
David O. Russell
#21. I admire Russell Simmons. He is a successful dude that has done a little bit of everything. He keeps it moving, and he's still doing things. Larry David is also amazing. He is honest and blunt. A creative genius.
J. B. Smoove
#22. The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When I'm writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, 'I'm writing,' I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn't feel as real as when it doesn't seem to count as much.
David O. Russell
#24. I'm always looking for a way to surprise audiences. That's, I feel, my job as a director. I felt that Amy Adams playing a tough woman in 'The Fighter' was a surprise. People saw her as a princess.
David O. Russell
#25. I make every movie and every scene like it could be my last. That's the only way I know how to make cinema that stands on its feet. I have to treat it like that. It has to be life and death stakes.
David O. Russell
#26. Russell Crowe is normally an actor who disappears so far into his characters you'd swear his DNA has been altered.
David Edelstein
#27. I think it [films] was my passion without it being declared like a job that I could have, or a career that I could have.
David O. Russell
#28. The great lesson about filmmaking is never take "no" for an answer, especially if you have a lot of passion and inspiration to do something.
David O. Russell
#29. As people, my parents,were very colorful, very talkative, passionate, they really loved each other. But that also meant heated, it meant there was a lot of drama in the house. Which is good for a filmmaker, I think.
David O. Russell
#30. Life to me is a journey - you never know what may be your next destination.
David Russell
#31. Some of Jimmy Stewart's performance in 'It's A Wonderful Life' is some of the most disturbing performance he ever did, when he falls apart and when he breaks down.
David O. Russell
#32. We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.
David Russell
#33. I feel profoundly blessed. I feel it's a great privilege to make any motion picture.
David O. Russell
#34. Christianity has been responsible for plenty of horror and death in the world, all supposedly in God's name.
David O. Russell
#35. The Republicans just want to bankrupt the government. They think that the government should do nothing, except maybe support the military. So terrorism is perfect for them.
David O. Russell
#36. I got put on jury duty, which is where I learned how to write.
David O. Russell
#37. When I write an email where I outlined a whole scene, it just came out of my unconscious, it comes from a deeper place. The same thing happens when the actors go, take after take, and just get lost in it. When you're in a house, you don't think about being in the house; you're just there.
David O. Russell
#38. If you have a piece by Bach, he often develops the piece to such a high level that you can hardly do much more to it. But Saint-Luc wrote very simple baroque music, and so if you do not embellish it, it just falls apart. It's way too simple.
David Russell
#39. It's absurd that we're so quick to criticize Muslims for being fundamentalist when Christians can be just as extreme and fanatical and frightening.
David O. Russell
#40. David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He's not only a great director, but he's also a great writer.
Adam McKay
#42. It's not easy to follow Jesus' example, and if you go to church it doesn't mean you're automatically doing it.
David O. Russell
#43. That's just how I see things. I think things that are the most dramatic or tragic can also look the most ridiculous and funny. That's part of being human.
David O. Russell
#44. Quite frankly, the bible is filled with advice that you'd never, want to follow. "Don't cut your hair on a rainy Thursday because locusts will eat your farm" kind of thing.
David O. Russell
#45. What we assert, very often can become our reality. To some degree, everybody can try to shape and control their fate. Everybody picks an identity.
David O. Russell
#46. You should always make it like it's your last film. That's my personal belief. Every filmmaker is going to have another belief. That's the only way I know to try to make a film that might be good. You got to take it real seriously like it's your last thing.
David O. Russell
#47. I love so many directors. I love David O. Russell. I love David Fincher, I love Alexander Payne and Jane Campion and my aunt. Spike Jonze. There are just so many amazing directors.
Gia Coppola
#48. I think I land somewhere between Scorsese and Capra in what I'm drawn to emotionally; I'm drawn to very intense emotion. Capra freaked people out when they saw Jimmy Stewart lose it in 'It's a Wonderful Life.'
David O. Russell
#49. I would say that when I came into this chapter of my filmmaking career, starting with 'The Fighter,' there was this sense that you have to go from your instincts and you have to go from your gut, and you have to not hesitate and you have to not hedge.
David O. Russell
#50. You learn by trying and failing. Just a lot of hard work and mistakes.
David O. Russell
#51. You can't force a movie to happen. Movies happen when they're supposed to happen. Everything happens in God's time. I really believe that.
David O. Russell
#52. It's a closing of the mind that happens when you want to be lazy and go with the easiest answers, like the media do all the time in their sound bytes.
David O. Russell
#53. I think that David Stern is probably the greatest commissioner that any sport has ever had in the history of this country.
Bill Russell
#55. 'The Fighter' was about a family struggling to overcome and fighting each other sometimes, and I went back and rewrote this script which I had written for my son initially because my son has mood disorder.
David O. Russell
#56. Just as He had done with David, Samuel, and Joseph of the Old Testament, God took an innocent, unlearned boy, one still unsullied by the world and pliable to His divine will, and molded and shaped him into His chosen prophet.
M. Russell Ballard
#57. It matters not that giants of tribulation torment you. Your prayerful access to help is just as real as when David battled his Goliath. see 1 Samuel 17.
Russell M. Nelson
#58. One of the things I've discovered at my age is I must have enchantment. And that was not clear to me in my earlier years. When I look at my favorite films, the Frank Capra - even Scorsese, even 'Goodfellas,' what makes that movie so remarkable is there's enchantment in their world.
David O. Russell
#59. And if you can come through that and still have some connection to your joy you felt when you were a child that's a very mature kind of a joy that I find inspiring. And Jennifer Lowrence has all that in her, and I've watched her have to go through it even in the last few years.
David O. Russell
#60. [David Tennant's] Doctor has such humanity, he seems to understand us and he's very warm, so he's a comforting Doctor to be with, and he enables us to be slightly scarier than we had been.
Russell T. Davies
#61. David Whitmer wrote: ' Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine.'
Russell M. Nelson
#62. There's always hope. Never give up. Walk slowly and drink lots of water. It ain't a sprint.
David O. Russell
#63. When most people turn on their TVs, they don't expect a frank discussion of philosophical ideas in their practical context. Or any context.
David O. Russell
#64. Just work on your craft hard - that's your only hope of doing anything worthwhile.
David O. Russell
#65. There's nothing better than an actor who is really, really hungry to show everything they've got.
David O. Russell
#67. You know, veterans come home and they may not be bipolar, but after they've been through a war with PTSD or a head injury, their families have a handful when they come home.
David O. Russell
#68. I was frustrated because I couldn't get going, as I was trying to figure out how to make films. I had various jobs, I taught a SAT class, I was a bartender, I had a day job at an office and was making short films.
David O. Russell
#69. The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
David Russell
#70. a statement by Bertrand Russell ... embodies the tone of heroic denunciation that you can muster only if you have drunk deeply from the cup of your own oracular majesty
David Brooks
#71. King David had gotten old. He was so cold and frail that the court appointed a young woman to snuggle with him in his bed. No, they didn't have sex. Though the court did make a point of hiring someone beautiful, just to put a little sizzle in his chicken.
Mark Russell
#72. I did a dance sequence in my second short film, which was my best short film, called 'Hairway to the Stars,' and I think Chris Wink, the founder of Blue Man Group, was in that. It's a black-and-white dance sequence. We were Glorious Food waiters together.
David O. Russell
#73. The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.
David O. Russell
#74. I hadn't made that movie before and when I ever met the real Joy Mangano, which happened because De Niro insisted we meet her and her father, that's what she felt like to us. She impressed us with her quiet, serene authority with herself
David O. Russell
#75. It's my experience that endings are never easy, and I think I'm not alone among filmmakers or writers in this.
David O. Russell
#76. The gift of life is the gift to suffer sometimes and to embrace it, heartbreak and all.
David O. Russell
#77. Russell, the gallant knight, with sureness of spirit and the smile of the gods, was carrying the woman who raised
him into the rainy night. I was Paladin, Tristan and King David.
James Aura
#78. If something - if you have a good rapport then you're friends and you're offered projects together or you discover stories together. Jennifer and I discovered this story together, and it was evident to us we would only do it with each other.
David O. Russell
#79. Life just happens the way it's supposed to happen. It delivers you to where it delivers you.
David O. Russell
#80. My parents are artists and they decided they would prefer to paint in the Mediterranean rather than in Scotland.
David Russell
#81. I think audiences deserve the benefit of the doubt. I prefer to be surprised by them rather then just assume they'll react negatively to any new idea.
David O. Russell
#82. My father kind of had hopes that I was going to become an artist like him - the typical thing. Of course I could play guitar better than him when I was about 12. But I couldn't paint better than him. So I went, 'I'm going to be the guitarist of the house, not the painter.'
David Russell
#83. I think any spiritual experience that's worthwhile is not about ego and it will humble you in some way. And also, a Zen monk once said to me, 'If you're not laughing, then you're not getting it.'
David O. Russell
#84. Get the right perspective. When Goliath came against the Israelites, the soldiers all thought, "He is so big. We can never kill him." David looked at the same giant and thought, "He is so big. I can't miss."
Russell Johnston
#85. In 1946, Bertrand Russell, a friend of Einstein, said it was necessary to use the fear of nuclear weapons to force all nations to give up their sovereignty and submit to the dictatorship of the United Nations.11
David Icke
#86. The cinema that I make is a cinema about people, emotion, humanity and passion. It's not just about what they struggle through, but what they live for. That's what I love. The music they love, the people they love, the clothing, the hair and the life that they love
David O. Russell
#87. Bush was in a shithole on September 10th. 9/11 was the best thing that ever happened to him.
David O. Russell
#88. I think if religion closes discussion or exchange of ideas or curiosity about other views, it's not true to its core.
David O. Russell
#89. I don't try to make the guitar sound like the harpsichord or lute. That makes you end up being like a bad copy.
David Russell
#90. Gay marriage is a complete red herring to distract everyone from the economy and the war and health care and education.
David O. Russell
#91. The endings for all my characters seem sufficiently human and messy for me to feel comfortable with them. In some ways they have only moved an inch, but sometimes an inch is a great distance.
David O. Russell
#92. I just love real characters; they're not pretentious, and every emotion is on the surface, they're regular working people. Their likes, their dislikes, their loves, their hates, their passions; they're all right there on the surface.
David O. Russell
#93. If the price is very cheap then it's almost certainly a fake.
David Russell
#94. What do we have in life, really? If we're lucky we get to a certain age, and we have each other. We have the food we like. We have our crazy little rituals. And we have each other.
David O. Russell
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