[...] I think everyone's inherently snobbish. Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, "Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good." Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.
[...] Kitsch is a way that posh people admit to themselves that they like things that ordinary people like. In my opinion.
[...] If a nation doesn't have a shared moral code how can it manage to order itself and maintain peaceful co-habitation without tighter and tighter reins being applied? With the death of god (as I recently read someplace, shot in the back of the head) on what energy field is the moral compass based? I feel that with the death of the notion of an external god, a necessary step in our evolution perhaps, to some extent we've also done away with the notion of ourselves as spiritual beings, as something more than flesh and blood. This imbalance will need correcting if we're to continue to evolve holistically.
[...] Some of us bear heavier handicaps than others but as J.G. Bennett once said in a quote that is sampled on Robert Fripp's album 'exposure' "if you know you have an unpleasant nature and dislike people, this is no obstacle for work". Which I take to mean that, despite the most inhibiting of handicaps, work on oneself, in the spiritually disciplined sense, is always available to you. And again, same source; "it is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering". The cause of this suffering is of course, generally speaking, ourselves.
I’m very attached to a beautiful formula written by Serge Daney, one of the best French critics who I had two or three classes with in Lisbon. He said that with the movies that we like, it is the films that see us. Of course it is you that is watching the film, but the film sees you, it watches you grow up. The film tells you something, to live this way and talk that way. I knew I would like to live in the worlds that some filmmakers showed me, and I could also see immediately that certain films were not for me, because they weren’t watching me. It’s a very beautiful formula, maybe a bit vague or poetic, but you feel it immediately. [...] With my own films it’s the same feeling. If it feels right it is like the images and the sounds are watching you and protecting you, showing you the way to do this or that. It’s not the script, it’s not your ideas. It’s something more real and integrated and in time. It’s more in life.
Entrevista com Pedro Costa no site da revista Little White Lies.
