Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Usually, if you read a script by somebody else and there's a dense page of stage directions, people just skip through it or speed read it.
There are plenty of movies that you need to chew on a bit. Movies that you return to and see something different in the second time around.
I think the premise of somebody trying to recreate a night from their teenage years stuck with me as something potentially very tragically comic.
I remember seeing 'Gremlins' and having my mind blown and seeing 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' at 13, and it was this hugely aspirational experience.
It's a very rare and fortunate position to be able to make movies with two of your best friends who happen to be really amazing actors and writers.
'Scott Pilgrim' is something that was a little bit more difficult to put in one box. But, to me, that's not necessarily a bad thing about the movie.
I love horror, sci-fi and action, or I wouldn't make these kinds of movies, but those designations are Trojan horses to make these personal comedies.
I'd like to do some things over again. I never want to repeat anything that went well, though - I just want to do better at slightly different things.
My parents used to talk about Sergio Leone films a lot. And I got really into them. I love Clint Eastwood. I love the camera angles. I love the music.
I definitely went through a period when I was a teenager when every girl was 'The One' and every break-up was the 'Worst Thing That Had Ever Happened.'
The first TV show I worked on was with the guys from 'Little Britian,' Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who did a show in 1995 I directed, 'Mash and Peas.'
It's funny: sometimes with 'Spaced,' people would try and read too much into something I'd done, with the references meaning something more than they do.
The editing process, to use a slightly grim analogy, is like the slow suffocation of lots of babies. It's like, which finger do you want to cut off first?
Once people realized that, 'Hey, we're going to be left on Earth here, and everything is going to hell quickly,' sci-fi soon became about our own self-destruction.
Some people are brilliant on the first take, some people are brilliant on the fourth take, and when you are doing a group scene, you kind of have to figure that out.
I remember when we did 'Shaun of the Dead,' and when we were trying to get it off the ground in 2001 before we actually made it, a lot of people just didn't want to know.
Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget.
There are lots of films I wish stopped at installment number one. I like 'Back to the Future Part II' and 'Part III' enough, but I still like the ending of the first one better.
I've always been fascinated by horror films and genre films. And horror films harbored a fascination for me and always have been something I've wanted to watch and wanted to make.
There have been recorded cases of people learning how to fly a plane after playing a flight simulator, but there's never been a case of someone learning to fight by playing 'Tekken.'
Occasionally, you'll get a 'District 9,' a film that is politically charged, but there is nothing going on beneath the surface with a lot of horror films. They are not about anything.
Tony Scott, Walter Hill, Michael Mann - I'm a big action fan, full stop. And even though Michael Mann is the more celebrated film-maker than Tony Scott, I love them both in different ways.
I'm a big fan of films that I grew up on and would watch obsessively, over and over again. If I didn't feel like I got everything on the first watch good, I want to see it again immediately.
Usually in TV... A TV director could be anything from a main grip to just a glorified cameraman, and sometimes a director can be the person who is hired last. It's very much a producer's medium.
I was never a DC kid - I went through a phase from, like, 11 to 17 where I would try to buy as many Marvel titles as possible. And '2000 AD' was kind of the sort of sci-fi/punk of British comics.
For 120 minutes, 'Birdman' floats from comedy to surrealism to high drama to quiet brilliance. I felt so inspired by watching this movie. It reaches for the sky and never comes back down to earth.
If you ever watch police chases on, like, helicopter cams, they very quickly become nightmarish when you start to see the police coming in from the edge of the frame. I always find that terrifying.
Between the ages of 18 and 20, I made three hour-long films. One was a superhero film called 'Carbolic Soap.' One was a cop film called 'Dead Right.' And the other was called 'A Fistful Of Fingers.'
If you have ever driven around London and seen the amount of one way systems... they basically rubbed out all car chase crime. In fact, if you get bank robberies in the U.K., they're using scooters.
By the time I got to Bournemouth Art College, I'd been so inspired by Sam Raimi and Robert Rodriguez and their tiny, no-budget films that I decided to do a feature-length version of 'Fistful Of Fingers.'
I don't want to get them in trouble for crimes in the early '90s - but there was usually like one pub that was the soft touch in terms of you could get served under 18, and that pub was The Rose and Crown.
Comics have years to explain this stuff, and in a movie, you have to focus on one thing. So it's about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus.
A lot of recent comic book adaptations have gone two ways: either they're striving for some kind of realism, like 'Iron Man' or 'The Dark Knight,' or they're very stylised and gritty, like 'Sin City' and '300.'
I would say 'American Werewolf in London' is like an unconventional buddy movie: even if the buddy dies 20 minutes in, he still remains throughout the picture, and their partnership is one of the best things in the movie.
When I was younger, I used to love Tim Burton's 'Batman.' I was, like, 15, and even then, I was aware, 'This is really the Joker's film.' It's like, the Joker just takes over, and Batman, you really don't learn too much about him.
In a lot of action films, a lot of guys are driving muscle cars or vintage cars, whereas in reality, a lot of getaway drivers would actually choose, like, commuter cars and find a way to blend into freeway traffic as quickly as possible.
I know it's become an ongoing thing about whether videogames are art, and I think there's plenty of examples of things that use the form in a fascinating way. Things that are more surreal or artistic, like 'Katamari Damacy' or 'Vib-Ribbon.'
If you go back to your home town or you're reunited with school friends, its always slightly bittersweet because as much as there's nice things in terms of seeing them again, the town has changed without you, and you're no longer a part of it.
We got offers to make sequels to both 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz,' and they never really interested us because we like having these endings where it seems very final but could hint at some kind of future adventure that you'll never see.
It's funny, my agent came up to us and said, "That line, when Nicholas says, 'I'm gonna bust this thing wide open,' what film's that from?" I said, "I think it's from every film." It's just like you get into that kind of mode of generic dialogue, it's fun to do.
Usually if I find a film that's challenging, that I'm intrigued by, I want to watch it again knowing what the ending is. I found that with something like 'The Godfather Part II.' I think it took me three watches to fully experience it in the way it was intended.
What 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz' and 'World's End' do is smuggle a different movie under the guise of a zombie movie or a cop or alien invasion movie. Even though they all have action and carnage, they are really films about growing up and taking responsibility.
Mel Brooks is an interesting one because he started out making films about stuff that he was totally affectionate about, like musicals, westerns, horror films, Hitchcock films. And then, as they get further on, and you get to 'Spaceballs,' then it's just kind of contrived.
The sci-fi movies I grew up with, the metaphor was very rich, and they used to really mean something: David Cronenberg's films, or John Carpenter's films, or the Phil Kaufman and Don Segel versions of 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,' or George Romero's early zombie films.
I found, after the experience of making 'Shaun Of The Dead' and then returning to the blank page - because 'Shaun Of The Dead' was the first screenplay I ever wrote properly - the experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful.
I used to stay up all night playing 'Resident Evil 2,' and it wouldn't stop until the sun came up. Then I'd walk outside at dawn's first light, looking at the empty streets of London, and it was like life imitating art. It felt like I'd stepped into an actual zombie apocalypse.
My favorite film of all time is 'Raising Arizona.' I watched it again as soon as it was over. I had it on VHS, rented it, and I watched it and said, 'I want to watch that again, right now.' I think I did the same with something like 'Goodfellas,' which is a completely different genre.
I always liked movies like 'American Graffiti' and 'Gregory's Girl.' 'Gregory's Girl' is particularly perfect because it really captures that summer holiday bubble of teenage utopia. Even though it's got a happy ending, there's a feeling that these characters may never see each other again.
When you write something, at first you might feel very defensive and protective of every single thing, but after a while, you just see what works and what doesn't. Sometimes you do test screenings, and an audience tells you that, or sometimes you eventually just go, 'Let's cut the joke out.'
I first saw Walter Hill's second film, 'The Driver,' as a teenager, late at night on the BBC, quite possibly sitting too close to the telly. Given that this 1978 slice of neo-noir takes place almost entirely in the dark streets of a deserted downtown L.A., it's really a perfect midnight movie.