Don Hertzfeldt Quotes

#1. The design is a really flat primary color with all sorts of abstract geometric shapes, just implying something. And then you'd have your characters running from something with guns. It was very expressionistic.

Don Hertzfeldt

#2. It's one of those things that if I was smart enough to explain it in words, I wouldn't have had to make a movie [ "World Of Tomorrow" ] out of it. It's a love letter to science fiction.

Don Hertzfeldt

#3. Time travel is a thing. It can be very dangerous, and it's also very - it's an expensive thing to do.

Don Hertzfeldt

#4. There's really no reason film and digital can't happily co-exist and benefit from one another. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to sell you something.

Don Hertzfeldt

#5. Usually the more money that something takes to make, the less interesting it's forced to become.

Don Hertzfeldt

#6. Fighting a cold, but I'm powering through. As they say, there's nothing better for a cold than doing interviews all day.

Don Hertzfeldt

#7. I'm a bit of a weird creature ... I'm self taught and went to a regular film school, not art school, and I think it's unusual for somebody to approach animation from that angle. In a sense I've sometimes consclassered myself more of a filmmaker who just happens to animate.

Don Hertzfeldt

#8. I have friends and illustrators who can't stand drawing on the Cintiq. [A graphic pad tablet used by digital animators] There's a certain tension and friction when you draw on paper that they miss. The tablet is very slick. It's like drawing on glass. But that didn't bother me at all.

Don Hertzfeldt

#9. To me everyone goes through that at some point in adolescence, you know. There's - you meet someone when you're a young teenager, and they're never right for you, and you always wind up hurting someone on the way to figuring out all this stuff. But it was a fun writing process.

Don Hertzfeldt

#10. Maybe the most annoying questions is: "Where do you see yourself in so many years?" It's a terrifying answer no matter how you think of it.

Don Hertzfeldt

#11. After working so long on something like this, it's great to go out and meet people and see the reactions and remind yourself that, oh, yeah,, I wasn't just working in a cave by myself for no reason.

Don Hertzfeldt

#12. I'm still learning. I've never done a digital project before. And I'm pretty sure I did things to the software that weren't supposed to be done.

Don Hertzfeldt

#13. I'd love to start some movements. What I'm tired of is irony, and sarcasm, and music/movies/what have you, not having the guts to mean anything.

Don Hertzfeldt

#14. I frequently run into this, where I genuinely feel like - and this is not just my head cold talking right now - I often, and this is going to sound weird, but I often feel like the guy who makes these movies is smarter than me. Smarter than the guy on the phone right now.

Don Hertzfeldt

#15. When you get questions that annoy you the art is answering them differently. If you're bored with it, then everyone will be bored with it.

Don Hertzfeldt

#16. I'll have a sentence in my head that's kind of beautiful and interesting, but I'm not sure why or where it's coming from. So it's kind of funny, because when people point out patterns or themes, it's the exact opposite of my film school experience.

Don Hertzfeldt

#17. To be animating at the same time, it's the ultimate freedom in filmmaking because you can literally put anything on the screen that you can imagine.

Don Hertzfeldt

#18. I think one of the reasons I love science fiction so much is that it's - when it's ideally done right, it's a reflection on ourselves.

Don Hertzfeldt

#19. I've loved science fiction my whole life. But I've never made a science fiction movie.

Don Hertzfeldt

#20. No matter what decade science fiction comes from, it's representing the present.

Don Hertzfeldt

#21. Tuesday's coming, did you bring your coat?

Don Hertzfeldt

#22. If you go to a film festival and watch a bunch of features and then watch a bunch of shorts, you will almost always find that the shorts are where people are taking more risks and pushing more boundaries ... simply because they have much less to lose.

Don Hertzfeldt

#23. It's naturally kind of humiliating and strange to have a microphone; when you're young you just make movies, you don't worry about all the peripheral stuff that comes with it.

Don Hertzfeldt

#24. The only purpose of the visuals, in any film, is to serve the story.

Don Hertzfeldt

#25. I've never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it [animation drawing].

Don Hertzfeldt

#26. But I had never drawn on a tablet before. I've been doing pencil and paper and film for almost 20 years. I wanted to try something different. I wanted to teach myself some digital stuff in advance of a bigger feature project that's coming up, and I took to it really quickly.

Don Hertzfeldt

#27. Both the writing and the visuals in that sense are very exploratory. It goes back to my rule for myself [in] making it.

Don Hertzfeldt

#28. Most people's personalities and roles are locked by the time they're nine or 10. I think there's something to that.

Don Hertzfeldt

#29. To me, that's where memories are very interesting because what happens when we start losing memories? What happens when you can't take your memories with you? Who are we without our memories, without our past?

Don Hertzfeldt

#30. It's great for me to hear those different reactions because when I travel with a movie like this [World of Tommorow], it's very similar. You'll hear a line in one city get a big laugh, and then in another city, the same line kind of gets a gasp, and that's wonderful.

Don Hertzfeldt