Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are a lot of visual marks that have to be hit, and lines that need to be said in a right way - so there wasn't really any improvisation on the set when it came to the bulk of the script.
I lived in the cultural equivalent of Tatooine when I was a little boy. I didn't live in London, I didn't live right in the middle of where everything was happening, I lived on the very edge of it.
A biological agent, I’ll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It’s hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.
This idea of popular culture became something that belonged to us rather than something that we looked at from far away. We realized we could be part of it and create it, instead of just being consumers only.
I mean, yeah, I'm sure that Python and the other things have paved the way for a greater understanding of the British sense of humor, but I don't think it's all that different than the American sense of humor.
If I did a TV show, it would have to be in North London because I'm a bit of a homebody, and my work takes me away from home enough. But yeah absolutely. Television has never been more exciting than it is now.
The revolution of video had a massive affect. We grew up in a time where suddenly you could own films. Before, they had a theatrical run, and then perhaps they'd come back, or you'd catch them in a retro cinema.
We realised that it was important to embrace this popcorn logic, that it works, that it's funnier when you fire 20 rounds from one tiny pistol. Then it becomes the joke, it's funnier when you pay less attention.
Like behind the car or in the pub, to do a scene, a proper nice dramatic scene, it's always a treat. And they're usually shot as one, so you've got a big chunk of dialogue to learn, and you feel like you're working.
It's a fun world to exist in, and I relish doing those movies as much as I do the smaller ones. They're always immense fun. I don't know if I am - unless we do a Benji film, I don't think I am an action hero really.
We don't watch the film anymore because we've seen it so many times, so we'll introduce it, walk out and we'll come back in right about when I wake up in the morning and walk over to the shop and everything's changed.
We suddenly saw how people reacted in the event of massive social upheaval, and the way that the little problems in your life don't go away. You don't stop being frightened of spiders just because the world's blown up.
Suddenly, the world I had scrutinised for so long was all around me, as if I had leaned forward and climbed into the television like Alice through the looking-glass. I had no idea just how deep the rabbit hole would go.
I hesitate to say I was the class clown, but that was kind of how I interacted with other kids in school, and I very much appreciated the responses I got. The validation of laughter is often a very heavy psychological balm.
It wasn't until a year later, when a young woman with Danish pastries on either side of her head knelt down in front of a walking dustbin to record an important message, that love truly came to town." - p 16 [re: Princess Leia]
When men write women, they tend to write women the way they want women to be, or the way they resent women for being. They don't really - they seldom nail it. It takes a woman to write a really good female character. I like that.
As a kid, I was a huge fan of movies and acting. My mom was in the sort of community theater, and I always hung around down there, and I was a massive fan of everything I'm kind of involved in now. But fairly ordinary and cheeky.
That's what we wanted to get across in that moment, particularly when Shaun goes to the shop when he's all hung over. He doesn't notice any of the zombies around him just because he never had before, so why should he at that point?
Every person should have their escape route planned. I think everyone has an apocalypse fantasy, what would I do in the event of the end of the world, and we just basically - me and Nick - said what would we do, where would we head?
There are some incredible television shows. It seems a sort of succumbed place to be. At the moment, I'm quite happy sort of flitting from place-to-place. I wouldn't want to relocate from where I am right now in terms of where I live.
I was the naughty kid that the teachers liked. I bullied a kid in the 1st year when I was in the 2nd, who then hit puberty like a plane crash and grew into a gorilla who bullied me when he was in the 4th year and I was in the 5th. That's Karma.
If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?
Both me and Edgar are firm believers in never underestimating or talking down to an audience, and giving an audience something to do, to give them something which is entirely up to them to enter into the film and find these hidden things and whatever.
The only thing that would deter me at the moment would be the idea of doing one thing for a very long time. There is no doubt in my mind that television is an incredibly auspicious medium right now. It's where a lot of the serious acting is taking place.
If I was a supervillain, I think I'd probably ban all smoking and drinking. That's exactly what I'd do: I'd remove all the cigarettes and alcohol from the world. That would piss so many people off. That's worse than, like, murdering puppies. For some people.
Jewish comedians do the best Jewish jokes, and anyone else doing that, they don't have a right to, because they're not coming from that experience. I know that's a slightly heightened example, but it's the same thing. We're bumpkins, so we can make bumpkin jokes.
Now there's a whole generation of filmmakers who grew up making their own films with video cameras, and have dined entirely on a diet of popular culture. It's been reflected in a lot of their work. It's self-reflective, it's quite knowing, but it's very literate.
The thought of filming in London was a big draw because I could stay in my house. I read it, and I was really taken with it because it felt at once very unapologetic for what it was, which is a romantic comedy. But at the same time, a little spiky and a little truthful.
Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly.
I like to work in films, but I'd love to work in the technical side of film. I'd love to work with, say, Greg Nicotero [The Walking Dead] in kind of, like, special makeup effects. I'd probably say, "Good with clay and latex." Although I don't know what kind of job that'd get me.
Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about... whatever. Now we're walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk had a fight with a robot.
When you meet people that you know from other films - as often happens to me, and as tends to happens to you when you're an actor, you constantly meet people that you've seen in other films. But when it's people who've kind of had a seismic effect on your life, it's quite extraordinary.
Nira Park, who is my longtime producer and friend - I've know her since we did Spaced, the TV show - she gave me this script the last day of filming The World's End. She said, "Take a look at this. It's filming in London next year, and you might like to look at Jack." I trust Nira implicitly.
A movie is a creative process from its conception, through its writing, to its execution, to the editing. I think with the best films there is some kind of contribution from one person all the way through that. The best films are made by people who write, direct, and edit, so there's continuity.
I've appeared in those kind of films and have great fun doing it, and I'm always up for a challenge. I think with things like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, those things are such an ensemble, it's not like I'm Ethan Hunt. I'm Benji. I'm the guy that does the computer business. I know my place.
Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.
Rory is very established in England, which you are seeing right now with Bond. But his father Roy Kinnear was a very, very beloved comedy actor here in the UK. And Rory actually even looks a bit like his dad. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that Rory has such good comic chops because it's in his blood. He's very, very funny as Sean.
My worst job was packing animal feed in a warehouse in Gloucestershire when I was a student. It was a very strange environment. It was hung heavy with oat dust, the place was infested with mice, and everyone who worked there was over 60, and I was 18. It was crazy. Apologies to anyone who works in animal-feed packing industry and loves it.
There seems to be this tendency toward denigrating romantic comedies as of late because it becomes something sort of cheesy or whatever. Whereas this embraced what it was. As a fan of When Harry Met Sally or Annie Hall, as a demonstration of what romantic comedy could be and should be, I immediately phoned Nira back and said, "Yeah, I'd like to do this. It'll be fun."
I realized that if I went snowboarding, you can't think of anything else when you're snowboarding. You can't hesitate or think about anything other than not falling off and breaking your neck. If you want a holiday where you're not gonna think about work and you're not gonna think about anything, snowboarding is the best way to do it. Or skiing, I guess. I don't ski, so I don't know.
When you go into a movie and you're surprised by it - these days with brand recognition being such an important thing and essentially trailers, the way trailers have evolved encouraging people not to see the film unless they've already seen the film which is kind of the paradox of marketing these days anytime that you enjoy genuine sense of wonder and surprise in the movies it's priceless.
I think we all mistake certain things for happiness. I think we mistake comfort for happiness and we mistake pleasure for happiness, and entertainment for happiness, when really these are just things we use as proxies for our happiness. We use them to cheer us up or try and achieve brief happiness, when really happiness is something much more profound and long lasting and exists within us.
We've kind of grown up in a post-Star Wars era, and what Star Wars did to cinema, in terms of an explosion of that kind of blockbuster culture. It's thrown up a generation of geeks. With the evolution of computer games and the Internet, that's all impacted on us as a generation, and affected the creative element of that generation enormously. So whereas the different schools of filmmaking...
Having done Spaced, I can't even remember it being that difficult on Spaced, but we know what the end's going to be like. We know why we're putting in this amount of work, or why a shot might be particularly tricky, because we know that what we do is create a whole package. It's the writing, the performances, and the style of camerawork, that's what we're working toward, and we're prepared for that.
Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture.
We might not know we are seeking people who best enrich our lives, but somehow on a deep subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether the bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a configuration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends, and we sometimes, before we even meet them.
Plainly it isn't an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn't always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connecting. Then again, perhaps the system is tenacious and continues to run like a computer program on infinite loop, so that if at first you don't meet, you are drawn back together for another try.
In the most basic terms it was about how when we experience art without critical awareness we consent to the ideas being promoted, either intentionally or unintentionally, by the filmmaker. For instance, if you watch a racist comedian and laugh at his jokes, you are consenting to the prejudices inherent within them. Similarly, if you watch a movie which perpetuates conventional ideas about race, gender, etc., you are consenting to them and not affecting change in any way.
It's why I get miffed at all the dashing around in recent zombie films. It completely misses the point; transforms the threat to a straightforward physical danger from the zombies themselves, rather than our own inability to avoid them and these films are about us, not them. There's far more meat on the bones of the latter, far more juicy interpretation to get our teeth into. The first zombie is by comparison thin and one dimensional and ironically, it is down to all the exercise.