Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm always after putting people in extreme circumstances. I'm always after not knowing what I'm doing in those extreme circumstances.
I dont see much difference between it and the other films though I can see on a rational and intelligent level there is a big difference.
The most important thing about Olympics, of course, is the games and not the opening ceremony. It's weird the way it gets inverted sometimes.
The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.
It just seduces you when you read a story and your brain relates to it. You recognize or connect with it. You identify with it; you're bound to.
I've just been to the Taj Mahal which I'd never been to and I'm not a very romantic kind of guy but it is the most romantic thing I've ever seen.
I always think, when there's stuff that people don't like, I always say that if I have another success, I'll enjoy it more, but you don't really.
Theres a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.
You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'
As soon as you think you can do whatever you want and you have whatever great professional in the world waiting to work with you, then you are sunk.
I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.
I have a philosophy, a belief, which I can see in many, many other directors that your early work is your best work, because you don't know what you're doing.
I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.
Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin's scripts. There's a huge amount of lines. There's a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace.
I always wanted to make this film or another film. I thought the worst thing you could do was to react to Slumdog's success in some way. I thought it would be really foolish.
Actors want to impress at the beginning, so you take advantage of that by suddenly saying, 'Right, you're here for two weeks.' What you're doing is creating a siege mentality.
You live your life and it ends quite quickly and all you can do with it is pass it on decently to someone else. Whether directly or indirectly, behave decently to other people.
I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.
You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion where you empathize and then you're frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.
Everybody expects you to be qualified to talk about your films, but in a way, you're the least qualified person to talk about them. When you're finished, you don't watch them at all.
Although computer chips now are thinner, they're more powerful, they're not as reliable. You'd harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they're reliable.
My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.
Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It's a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence. As is working within a circumspect budget.
Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you're time is over. They find you out and send you packing.
What you do is take the power [popularity] gives you - which is very temporary and minor but significant - and use it. The danger is that you use it on a vanity project that no one wants to watch.
If I was American, I think I'd live in New York, because I like that East Coast mentality. There's nothing wrong with Hollywood. If you want to be a big time filmmaker, you should go to Hollywood.
Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors are controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.
If the American taxpayer knew how much they paid per person to put Neil Armstrong on the moon they would never have paid it. It was hidden from them deliberately because the costs were astronomical.
To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.
I've never done a film before where every single person in the audience knows the ending. I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days. People are blogging your endings from their cinema seats.
That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.
My kids are too old to remember this now but, when they were much younger, I swore to them if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and thats what that was.
Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.
There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two.
It's interesting, the worse things get in cities, the tougher that cities get, the more brutal the humor is. The tougher things people face, the darker the sense of humor gets and I find that incredibly optimistic.
The individual will to survive is often seen as just that, an individual thing. In fact, it's sort of a gene we all carry and like a network of computers it all contributes in some way to when it's individually needed.
Movies are about time. You can take that momentum and manipulate time as well, or you can deliberately slow it down, stop it, and start it again. There is no other art form that does that type of manipulation in that way.
The perfect equation is form equals content. The style of the film reflects the story, and that's what you're always aiming for. You're not always necessarily successful at it, but that's the ambition that you're trying to do.
It's not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it's what you learn about yourself, really. It's a funny old hippie thing, but it's true as well. You find out a lot about yourself and your tolerance, and about your inclusiveness.
I like action movies, even though I think action movies are kind of derided now. But there is something extraordinary about action movies, which is absolutely linked to the invention of cinema and what cinema is and why we love it.
I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.
You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.
You can do anything you like - really - but this Sci-Fi is absolutely disciplined, it's Zen, you have to be absolutely focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and you then you can achieve when you get there. It's really weird!
If you approach India in the right way, you have so much to learn there about people, and there's so many people. It's such an extraordinary setup, and it's so bewildering how it manages to get through somehow, you can only wonder at it.
I always felt it is not good if you feel like you would know how to do something. I've made mistakes of telling people: I know how to do this. And it should feel dangerous. That is the only way to stay alert, to keep the adrenaline running.
Events in the present can trigger quite a young part of ourselves. If we don't take responsibility and start looking after that young part of ourselves, we can start asking partners to look after that part of ourselves or we wound ourselves.
When you're in zero gravity everything moves at the same speed and nothing stops it. If you throw something it travels forever but it still travels at the speed you threw it at. To make it plausible, movies have chosen to show it in slow motion.
Most films that I do, whether successful or not, just fade away. They have their moment in the sun, then they are gone. 'Trainspotting' did not, and especially with journalists. So whenever I launched a new film, I'd end up talking about 'Trainspotting.'
There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.