Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My stepmom's from Somalia, my baby sister is African American, my dad was always English, I'm a white man... You may have noticed.
Games have always presented an opportunity to escape. But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.
I want to do my Blade Runner, which is like a future Berlin film, which is like a thriller, but it's much deeper characters, I think.
I was massively jealous but also excited when Tarantino did Inglourious Basterds, I'm a huge guys on a mission fan. Those kind of movies.
I was in my 30s when I finally went to film school. It was kind of always going to happen, but I did try to keep it suppressed for awhile.
I was a little geeky kid anyway. If I wasn't shooting little stop-animation films, then I was playing computer games or Dungeons & Dragons.
I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'
We can't tell particularly smart stories if we want to keep our audience big enough to pay for these big spectacle films that we want to do.
I went to college and graduate school, studying philosophy. I really did think I was going to wind up being a lecturer or professor of some sort.
I watched the German version of 'Baron Munchasen' and Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' at a young age. 'Star Wars' was also a huge thing when I was a kid.
There's a depth to the look that you get with models that you just can't get with CGI. It's about the detail that you just wouldn't think to put in.
I think if you're young and you're being compared with a successful family member, it's really hard to maintain any sense of self-worth and credibility.
You would never have seen me on any party scene, which is probably what made me able to disappear, in a way, because the tabloids had nothing to follow.
'Warcraft' has always had a far higher percentage of women players than a lot of other games. It has always been a very welcoming environment for women.
Bill Pearson is definitely a man to talk to, especially in the afternoon when he's had a couple of drinks because he's got so many stories and anecdotes.
When I was at graduate school, you wouldn't have recognised me. I was so different - and not a nice person: a grumpy, surly, upset, confused, lost person.
There are things which need to be shown in the trailer in order to let the audience know what kind of film it is that they're going to be expecting to see.
Here in the UK the audience immediately reacts and they get the fact that: "What would be the most annoying thing in the world?" A Chesney Hawkes alarm clock!
In the past, a lot of films based on video games think that the audience wants to experience what it's like to play the game, and that's absolutely not the case.
The thing is that Warcraft has so much story available to it. For the fans, there are some key stories they really want to see on screen. I won't be doing those.
My parents did call me Zowie now and then, but then, realising that it drew too much attention, they called me 'Joe'. Then, later, I sort-of co-opted my own name back.
I've worked really hard to build up a career on my own. I turned 30 recently and it took me a long time to get the chance to make a feature film and do it on my own terms.
I've lived all over Europe, spent a lot of time in London, went to school in Scotland, college in America, so I do think I have sort of a sensibility on a fairly global level.
That definitely I feel is part of my generation: social networking, communication over the Internet, whether it's Skype or IRC or some form of text-based chat, text messaging.
I played lots of games, and I was a fan of gaming, so I was always looking for new games. I was also a science fiction and fantasy fan, growing up, in games and books and movies.
I think, visually, 'Moon' probably owes more to the first half of 'Alien' and 'Outland' than it does to '2001.' The character of Gerty is obviously a straight rip-and-riff on HAL.
I'm a film maker who started on the Atari and then went onto the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. So I possibly have a different sensibility to people who didn't play games growing up.
Growing up, I was on film sets occasionally, when my dad was acting, so I got to run around and do odd jobs on films like 'Labyrinth' and others... I seemed destined to make films.
Every film I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.
I don't know if subconsciously there was some reaction going on, if there was something in me that didn't want to learn an instrument - because I couldn't have been that incompetent!
I was a 'Warcraft' player myself, and when I pitched my take on the film, they said right away, 'That is a player. That is the game.' So I've had their support from the very beginning.
Fantasy films tend to skew towards what Tolkien fantasy was, which is that the humans, the Hobbits and the cute creatures are the good guys, and everything that's ugly are the bad guys.
Fantasy films tend to skew towards what Tolkien fantasy was, which is that the humans, the Hobbits, and the cute creatures are the good guys, and everything that's ugly are the bad guys.
I think everything you do, whether it's low budget things when you're first starting out or full feature films or when you're working with Hollywood, you're always learning, all the time.
I think I was brought up with games and I don't think that they're just Pac-Man or Space Invaders. I think we've moved on, I think that there are stories being told and worlds being explored.
My priority is having the ability to be creative and to come up with the right decisions and not be fettered. If there are a lot of people involved in decision making, it can become frustrating.
I think we tried to make a film [Moon] that was about human beings as opposed to going from one special effects set piece to the next one, which is what a lot of science fiction films these days do.
After 'The Fellowship of the Ring,' the films that followed it, instead of having their own unique aesthetic, they all wanted to be 'Lord of the Rings' as opposed to learning from 'Lord of the Rings.'
I'm not Akira Kurosawa. He used to write...He used to write a completely new spec script over a couple of nights. I'm not like that. It takes me a long time to put a film together that I want to make.
Jeron Lanier and 'Lawnmower Man.' That was VR. And there was the VFX1, that big giant VR prototype unit, and I was like, 'I am going to save my money and get one of those.' And then VR just sort of drifted away.
You have to be flexible enough to realize that, over the course of making a film for three and a half years, things are going to slightly change and drift, as you work out solutions to each problem as they come up.
You are spending millions and millions of dollars of other peoples money when you make a movie. You have to at least approach it in a way where you can see how you can make that money back for the people who are investing.
Everyone wants to know what you want to work on and everyone wants to pitch you what they're working on. And that's just part of the process. And hopefully, at some point you find someone of like minds and you make a film.
It took a generation of filmmakers who loved and were raised on comic books to make movies that you actually cared about and felt something for. I think that's absolutely the same with what's going on with videogame movies.
I was doing the promotion for Moon in LA at the same time that Tony Scott was there with [The Taking of] Pelham 123. But obviously he was so concentrating on his own film that he didn't even know I was doing a feature film.
I was the only kids to have Sony Umatic tapes of the old 'Star Wars.' It was such an old technology; you needed two or three tapes to show one movie, so the kids used to come over to my house, and we would watch 'Star Wars.'
It seems like the reason that I miss the science fiction from the late '70s and '80s is that at that period, they really were doing interesting, introspective human stories that just happened to take place in science fiction settings.
Science-fiction cities in general, I think, are so hard to get right, because it's so easy to just play some cheesy music or do something that takes you right out of it, but 'Blade Runner' got it right, and I love that about the film.
I've been working my way to doing my first feature film for about ten years. So I went through the commercials route and some people come from a theatrical background and some people come from a writing background, but I directed commercials
I got some funky scholarships to play soccer and did well in my SATs, so I went off to college and then grad school but found that that wasn't me. My family, relieved I seemed to have come to my senses, were happy to let me go to film school.