Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't like to watch a movie where it's just kind of like all one note, dee-dee-dee-dee. I want spikes of adrenaline and highs and lows and exciting tension release.
I have a bunch of movies that are, like, two minutes from being green-lit, or that they've maybe even told me are green-lit. But I never believe it until I see the money.
As you study vampire legend throughout history, it goes back to almost every culture. South Africa, Indonesia, crazy places have that legend and that idea of immortality.
I just wrote a really cool script. It's called "One Track Mind." It's an origin story about the most successful and the most foul-mouthed, outrageous songwriter in history.
Every filmmaker's just going to keep trying to make it the best you can make it: make it as potent and interesting and entertaining and exciting and tough and sexy as you can.
Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.
You can't really just think, "Oh, I want to make something that is going to appeal to every single person in the world." You have to just try to make a movie that comes from your heart.
When I talk to film students, I always say, "Buy the DVDs and listen to the commentaries, look at the making of, look at the behind-the-scenes," because that's such a great learning tool.
When I talk to film students, I always say, 'Buy the DVDs and listen to the commentaries, look at the making of, look at the behind-the-scenes,' because that's such a great learning tool.
I had always liked, well, who didn't love Lestat and fall in love with 'Interview with the Vampire,' and 'Nosferatu,' and Coppola's 'Dracula' with the awesome costumes? So I loved all that.
When I was just five years old, I loved the scary layer and the symbolical power of the red cloak. I made my mom make me that red cloak, and I had to wear it on Halloween, two years in a row.
If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.
The boys in junior high get really lewd and say outrageous stuff to the girls. If somebody yelled the stuff at me that I've heard at junior high schools I've visited, I'd be scared and humiliated.
I still like the idea of having an intimate experience with a movie, but I love watching stuff on my iPad. It's close, and I feel like I'm a part of it, so maybe that makes more sense in some cases.
Obviously, 'Twilight' had its own alchemy that was amazing, just phenomenal. Nobody thought it was going to make any money. Paramount wouldn't make the movie. Fox wouldn't make it. Nobody wanted to do it.
We love those beautiful, Latin American stories where there is an element that's more mysterious and wonderful. I think as a child a lot of us love the idea of the star and more of the supernatural elements.
I like doing commentary. As a filmmaker and film student, I think it's really interesting to hear what a director did and how they figured out how to do things. I often like the technical commentaries myself.
I was always trying to do architectural jam sessions. But it's not quite as easy as singing or playing a guitar, so I would always see wonderful live musicians and just envy them that I wasn't in that medium.
As a director, you try to do things that are going to touch the human experience somehow, and emotions that mean something to people. You search for those projects and you hope to realize the potential in a project.
People love to talk, so let them have fun talking, I think they have an interesting, wonderful connection, so you knowWhat does dating mean? I don't know. I couldn't say. People love to talk, so let them have fun talking.
I could go my whole life and say, 'I'm not going to do anything with a love triangle,' but whenever you have a romance, there has to be some obstacle, and even the dumbest romantic comedies have a love triangle or something.
Being in construction my whole life - I was trained as an architect - I always had to work with guys. And I always did my homework and then challenged them to figure it out faster than me. They don't want to be shown up by a woman.
Most of the female-directed films, if they got distribution, would have fewer dollars to support the film and play in fewer theaters than the men. Because the female-directed films go to smaller companies. So the gap starts widening.
I hope I haven't grown up. The cliche for all artists is that you don't want to lose that child inside. I think when you get sedentary and set in your ways, you can lose a lot of that spontaneity and creativity. I hope I'm holding on to that.
Hardly any filmmakers can just make anything they want. Obviously, there are some exceptions, like Steven Spielberg, but he has that mainstream mentality and the kinds of films he loves to make are the kind that appeal to this big, mass audience.
Back in medieval times, Victorian repression hadn't come in yet. People were bawdy and wild and more in touch with their true natures. If you look at the Bosch paintings or Bruegel, you see, when people are dancing, they're totally cutting loose.
As a director, when you cut scenes from a movie, you do it with the idea that it is making the story move forward and progress. Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.
You don't pay the same price for a Ferrari as you do for a Honda Accord. But for some reason, for movie tickets, you're asked to pay the same price for 'Avatar' as you are for some $2 million movie, which is kind of a weird thing when you think about it.
When you're in a creative flow with somebody - and I had this back in architecture school - you're just so passionate about what you're doing, and if that other person is just as passionate, you'll be madly in love with them. It's just that thrill of creating.
Meryl [Stripe]spoke out about the low percentage of female critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Why are there 760 male critics and just 168 women? You are immediately [biased] on what kind of films you are being told to go see. What are you told are good films? Male films.
I can go back to my very first movie, Thirteen, and think about that exact moment when I saw Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood do their chemistry read audition together. It just came alive. I was filming it with a video camera and I was like, "I know I can make a good movie now."
I'll literally pay three Hollywood readers who don't know me to read my scripts under the radar and give cold comments. And at the early screenings of my movies, I'll hand out questionnaires that can be filled out anonymously so people can be brutally honest because, to your face, they won't be.
We read about secret lives that people have on the Internet, or alternate lives of a serial killer where the whole family didn't know that their dad or their brother or their child was that. There are all the things in our heart that no one really knows, and I thought that that was interesting territory to explore.
The truth is, most of those female stories that are contending for Oscars are directed by men. Let's be honest. I looked at the 44 Oscar contenders in Variety that someone wrote up - there was not one directed by a woman. All the ones that were getting an Oscar pitch with the money and everything behind them were by men.
You actually do confront your dark side, your impulses, or your feelings of sibling rivalry in Cinderella or whatever. You admit that they exist and then you work through them and conquer them and come out living happily ever after having learned something. That's one reason why the fairy tales keep having traction and meaning.
Now there are three guys who directed "Twilight" films that had a gross of a gazillion dollars. All those "Hunger Games" guys, the "Divergent" guys. All those people. When they are looking for the next big director, they see they have a track record. So there's 20 people that spun off of "Twilight" that have more qualifications than any woman.
For Twilight, I wasn't thinking it was going to be a crazy success, or anything. It had been rejected by all the major studios. Nobody wanted to make it and they didn't think it would make any money, but I read the book and I thought, "Wow, I want to capture that feeling of just being crazy in love. I wonder if I can do that in a film." That was my challenge.
It's interesting for me to do the commentary with the actors because, as a director, you're so in your own world that you see it from your perspective, your issues and what you were trying to do, and then it's really very fun to hear their perspective on how it was to do a particular scene or how they felt, and sometimes, I didn't even know that, at the time.
I worked for 20 directors as a production designer, most male. I was on the set to witness firsthand a range of sometimes atrocious emotions - well-documented firings, yellings, fights between directors and actors, hookers, abusive things, budget overages, lack of preparation. A man gets a standing ovation for crying because he's so sensitive, but a woman is shamed.
Sometimes, a scene goes on too long and, with this being a suspense story and murder mystery that you're trying to discover through her heightened paranoia, you don't want scenes that take you on a tangent. Sometimes, you love those scenes, but you know that it's better not to be in the overall film. So, I'm not sad that they're not in the main movie, but I do think it's fun for people to get to watch them, if they want to.
Even after I had just done Twilight, which made $400 million at the worldwide box office, I could not get financing for three or four projects that I really loved and I thought people would love because they didn't fit some studio or investor's model of thinking, "This will definitely make money." It's a business and a film does potentially cost millions of dollars, and they have to think that they're going to get their money back somehow.