Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I didn't go to film school.
I didn't like being a name attached to a book.
'The Beach' novel, in my mind, was, in some respects, subversive.
The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.
By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.
Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time.
I carry a lot of scars. I like the way that sounds. I carry a LOT of scars.
Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.
I didn't intend to be a novelist. I didn't intend to be anything. I thought I'd be a journalist.
If someone says Wes Anderson is an auteur, I'll believe it 100 percent. Fine. He's an auteur, but I'm not.
Though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley
It's perfectly reasonable to say that AIs are potentially dangerous. That seems to me like a statement of fact.
Look, when AIs come up, they're not going to be like us. A self-aware, sentient AI is not going to be like a human.
I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down.
There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. (...) Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.
When I'm really fixated on a bit of writing, I can easily spend six days without leaving the house and barely leaving my room.
Waking was the most reliable part of a dream, as built into dreams as death is to life. You dream, you wake: you live, you die.
I'm always pushing back against the last thing I did in some way, and some of that is restlessness and a sense of limited time.
I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, "Oh ...".
Well, if there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen - no matter how small the likelihood.
I do all this alone, everything I achieve, I achieve alone, because it's my head I'm locked into, and I share this space with nobody but myself.
My approach to directing is to not do very much directing. I'm mainly interested in what the creative group individually and together are thinking.
Normally, small talk is enough for me to form an opinion of someone. I make quick judgments, often completely wrong, and then stick by them rigidly.
I think that screenwriting probably isn't seen as writing in the same way that novel-writing is seen as writing. But I certainly don't see it that way.
I don't write on set. I also - in a funny way, I don't really differentiate between the writing and directing. I think it's all sort of the same thing.
The first draft of 'Ex Machina' is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.
I know some directors get very involved in trailers and posters. Some even cut their own. I stay completely away from it. I just see my job as making a film.
I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off
There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.
I wrote a whole novel before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, for some reason I stuck at novels and wrote a second. Still not sure why I didn't give up. Stubborn, maybe.
Part of debunking the mythology of filmmaking is that we tend to want to locate it often in one person. And it's not one person. It's a collective, and it is a collaboration.
If you look at the whole life of the planet, we - you know, Man - has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out, that is a return to normality.
If I was being very honest about it, probably more honest than I should be, '28 Days Later' was a reaction to 'The Beach' in some ways because I felt it lacked a kind of aggression in it.
I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.
The key relationship for writers in film is producers, because those are the first two people involved and the ones who work on it intensely in a private way without the big machinery of film.
I knew my affection for the Philippines was equally as telling: a democracy on paper, apparently well ordered, regularly subverted by irrational chaos. A place where I'd felt instantly at home.
I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.
I've never been to Comic-Con, but I'm certainly aware from this side of the Atlantic that it's a very important part of film marketing now, even when the films are not directly linked to a comic.
If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.
There's this saying: in an all-blue world, colour doesn't exist... If something seems strange, you question it; but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison then nothing seems strange.
You fish, swim, eat, laze around, and everyone's so friendly. It's such simple stuff, but... If i could stop the world and restart life, put the clock back, i think I'd restart it like this. For everyone.
When I see 'Sunshine,' I see a film that part of me is kind of very proud of and another part of me is very sad about, so it's a really complicated film for me. And I've never been really able to resolve all that in myself.
Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren't up to the job.
The truth is, I hadn't grown up really wanting to be a writer. The whole thing was a weird aberration in some ways, and I didn't feel personally connected to the level of success I had with it - the success of sorts, I guess.
The scripts of 'The Wire' are fantastic - the scripts of 'Breaking Bad,' the scripts of 'Mad Men,' the scripts of 'The Sopranos,' the scripts of 'Battlestar Galactica.' You could keep going on. They're incredibly well written.
As for me... I'm fine. I have bad dreams, but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scares. I like the way that sounds. I carry a lot of scares.
What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.
It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script; I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.
When you encounter people in life - like a chance encounter at a bar or wherever you happen to be - you make these incredibly quick, quite intricate decisions about people based on very small amounts of coded information. We're good at that.
Sequels are generally done in a rush. They're done with a sense of urgency. The first time, you spend a long time developing to get it over the line. The second time, you don't. Your expectations are different, and your motivations are different.