Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My philosophy is to make movies with the biggest possible budget that will allow it to be made in an independent fashion.
This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie].
Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.
'The Exorcist' is the scariest movie ever made. It just felt dead-on real, like you were watching the existence of the devil.
For instance, The Sixth Sense had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.
Over the course of history, the people who are not scared go into the woods and are mauled by a bear, are not going to survive.
For instance, 'The Sixth Sense' had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.
You're saying, "I'm gonna do this thing," and you have to be aware, as a rational human being, that you may not be allowed back in.
You don't get to celebrate yourself unless you risk being mocked or rejected. As an artist, you cannot play it safe. You just can't.
I have worked hard and learnt that I have to make a decision - whether I am going to conform and protect myself or not. I chose not to.
Being insecure - I'm a master, a virtuoso - they can be handing me the keys to the kingdom and all I can think is, I hope I don't drop the key.
I offer originality: you don't know what my films are like until you go to them. I think that's the reason I've been getting all this attention.
I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.
The combination of the CGI, 3-D, and sound effects, it's just impossible to separate them. It gives you a more immersive experience, and I prefer that.
See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky?
I knew the moment it happened, it was a miracle. I could have been kissing her when she threw up. It would have scarred me for life. I may never have recovered.
I love my stories being multi-layered, and coming at it from different angles, so that you don't understand the film's true emotional motivation until the very end.
One of the reasons I really love low budget filmmaking is you don't have to think about that as much. You can have more fun and be more playful and be freer creatively.
'The Last Airbender' is genetically engineered for me. I love martial arts. I study it. The movie's based on a lot of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. I was raised Hindu.
The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.
So 'The Last Airbender' 's philosophy and culture feels like a beautiful idea to me: That we inherently have connections to the elements and what they teach us, and to each other.
There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It's something that I'm very careful about, that I'm just leaning too hard into something.
Basically, when I'm writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying.
Great actors come with depth about how their character sees the world, and they completely defend it. They could defend it in a court of law, down to the reason the patient deserved this.
I wouldn't describe myself as a do-gooder. That's really more my wife. I'm kind of just the obsessed guy who's been writing and making movies since I was a little kid, just in a room and make it.
When they see those fourteen lights, they're looking at a miracle. And deep down, they feel that whatever's going to happen, there will be someone there to help them. And that fills them with hope.
Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.
Each of the actors need to have their justification for saying something awful. You want everyone to have a positive and negative thing. Even a positive thing needs to have darkness in it. It needs to have depth.
I try to take B genre movies and treat them as if they're A dramas. Get the cinematographers, get the actors to do an A drama, but it just happens to be about aliens or ghosts or crazy people, or killers, or whatever it is.
I think I take what you might call a B-movie story, deal with B-movie subjects, and I treat it as if it's an A-movie in terms of my approach, my crew, my actors, my ethics and so on. I guess that's my trademark or one of them anyway!
I think I take what you might call a B-movie story, deal with B-movie subjects, and I treat it as if it's an A-movie in terms of my approach, my crew, my actors, my ethics and so on. I guess that's my trademark or one of them, anyway!
When you say fear of the unknown, that is the definition of fear; fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and its genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because were not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.
When you say 'fear of the unknown', that is the definition of fear; fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and it's genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because we're not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.
There are a lot of things I can take, and a few that I can't. What I can't take is when my older brother, who's everything that I want to be, starts losing faith in things. I saw that look in your eyes last night. I don't ever want to see that look in your eyes again.
The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.
People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance.
A TV show where all of the characters are trying to figure out what's going on, and the suspense of that, fits my [voice] really well. You feel their frustration, anger and fear, and then, when the reveal happens, their sense of dread or horror, or whatever it is, and I like to paint with those colors.
I think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.
As a child, I probably knew phrases that other children didn't known, like "pitocin drip" or "myocardial infarction." Some kind of knowledge was always in the air. My parents would always talk about science at the dinner table, saying something about this patient or some other patient. So I guess for a nanosecond in early high school, I thought about going into medicine.
My grandparents were classic Indian grandparents. My grandmother would put so much powder on her face that it was like a Kabuki play and she'd come down the stairs. I was like 8 or 9 years old. My grandfather apparently had no teeth because he would take out his teeth and put them in a glass, and then he would try to scare me with it. I started to try to scare them when I was a little older.