David O. Russell Quotes

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.

Anything you could ever want or be you already have and are.

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.

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.

I got put on jury duty, which is where I learned how to write.

There's nothing better than an actor who is really, really hungry to show everything they've got.

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.

The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.

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.

The gift of life is the gift to suffer sometimes and to embrace it, heartbreak and all.

There's always hope. Never give up. Walk slowly and drink lots of water. It ain't a sprint.

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.

I think film was my passion without it being declared like a job that I could have, or a career that I could have.

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.

Life just happens the way it's supposed to happen. It delivers you to where it delivers you.

You learn by trying and failing. Just a lot of hard work and mistakes.

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.

Bush was in a shithole on September 10th. 9/11 was the best thing that ever happened to him.

If you just work on your craft hard, that's your only hope of doing anything worthwhile.

Unhappy endings can be as cheap as happy endings.

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.

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.

It's my experience that endings are never easy, and I think I'm not alone among filmmakers or writers in this.

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.

Christianity has been responsible for plenty of horror and death in the world, all supposedly in God's name.

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.

To be honest, I think that Republicans love terrorism.

The religion itself may have some great ideas, but I can't take it seriously if it's blatantly exclusionary.

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.

It's not easy to follow Jesus' example, and if you go to church it doesn't mean you're automatically doing it.

I feel profoundly blessed. I feel it's a great privilege to make any motion picture.

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.

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.

I think that everybody does hustle in order to survive. That doesn't mean lying - it's more about how you handle situations.

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.

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.

When most people turn on their TVs, they don't expect a frank discussion of philosophical ideas in their practical context. Or any context.

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

I think if religion closes discussion or exchange of ideas or curiosity about other views, it's not true to its core.