Sebastian Lelio

The mystery of film is not in the script. It's in the shooting, in the interacting of humans and space and time.

I don't believe in closed scripts; I think that they should be open.

'Gloria' is a film about a fifty eight-year-old woman who is quite alone in life; however, she is quite optimistic. Nobody has much time for her, and so she regularly goes to these single adults' parties where she is looking for someone. By the end of the film, she doesn't necessarily find love, but she does find something else.

Chilean society is conservative, but U.S. society is puritanical.

I'm interested in characters. I love them, and I love to write them.

We all have a potential revolutionary energy inside.

I was always making new friends, then losing them.

Fashion is totally political, the icon of a political system.

I have never been religious, but I've seen the strength of it.

I had the idea that I'm going to make a trans-genre film about a transgender woman.

Film is a game of projections upon projections, and the projected image on the screen is a game of light and shadows. There is nothing there; it is the brain that is decoding those things. The film doesn't have any decipherable kind of meaning if it's not seen.

I went to church as a boy, and then I quite quickly stepped away from religion. But I remained fascinated by the need people have for religion.

When you're filming, you're blind. But if you follow what really moves you, then you operate from a place of hope: maybe that the story you're telling will resonate with whatever the world will have become when the film is ready to be born.

I wanted to be a poet. I wrote from ages 15 to 22, but I left it because I discovered, and fell in love with, cinema.

When you're filming, not everything is rational.

Every human society has its lights and its shadows. That's the reality of existence.

Rachel Weisz is amazing, instinctive, volcanic - an amazing force of nature.

This idea of walls, segregation, labels, and 'You against us' and 'We are superior and you are inferior.' Which people are legitimate? Which relationships are legitimate or not? Who declares that under which authority? These are things that are hugely important.

I don't come from a rich family, but my parents are professionals.

In order to make a film, you have to operate on many different levels, making all these different forms of expression converse, and so I just followed that intuition.