Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The bond company comes in if you exceed your costs; they're the insurers of the film. In the worst-case scenario, they take over the production.
At HBO, you've just basically got a studio full of artistically driven smart guys and women who really care about the quality first and foremost.
Like the music and the period, I wanted 'I'm Not There' to be fun and full of emotions, desires and experiments that were thrilling and dangerous.
Making a movie about the love between two women was really a tribute to the lesbian people in my life, my dear friends who are seminal in my life.
I noticed that there were all these kinds of practices in a working set that had to be un-practiced on 'Far from Heaven,' which was so interesting.
The Johnny Depp generation has this kind of brooding, weighty, introspective quality, very James Deanish. Which is nice, great for a lot of characters.
I felt I would have the most creative freedom making experimental films and teaching, as I had many good examples of people around me who did just that.
Looking at photographs of New York in 1952, you find a powerfully pre-Eisenhower era - sagging, tired, distressed - and the palette is slightly dissonant.
You always feel like rock critics are frustrated musicians. I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment.
When you think of the later '50s and 'Far From Heaven' and Eisenhower and Sirk, you think of that Hollywood panache and gloss to American middle-class life.
I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist. And that just kind of kept honing itself around film and getting closer to film.
I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.
I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.
I made little Super 8 extravaganzas when I was a kid, the first being my own version of 'Romeo and Juliet,' and where I played all the parts except for Juliet.
Films like 'The Godfather,' 'Chinatown' and 'The Exorcist' brought a realism and currency and understatement to their genres that we wanted for 'Mildred Pierce.'
I'm pretty single-minded, unlike a lot of directors who miraculously seem to be holding six projects in their hand at a given time and juggling them accordingly.
When 'Safe' came out, it was treated respectfully but kind of forgotten. Then, by the end of the '90s, it somehow made it onto all these best-of-the-decade lists.
I think that's what I love about glam-rock. It invited you to participate. It asked you to change yourself in all these different ways, or offered up all these options.
Every actor prepares differently and to different degrees of privacy. Some want to talk everything out. Others really don't want to talk anything out - or rehearse much.
'Carol' takes place at a time the country was crawling out of the shadows of the war years, feeling the new vulnerabilities of the Cold War and conflicts within the union.
At the time I made 'Safe,' I was really intrigued by the whole culture around AIDS, which was turning to people like Louise Hay and these other West Coast New Age thinkers.
I was lucky enough to be exposed to film, art, literature, culture, and then told, 'Yes, you can do that, too.' It's not something that everybody's circumstances allow for.
I do know my own films don't necessarily work within that high-pressure reductive moment of the opening weekend - or all the ways that many people assess the value of movies.
Aspects of guilt or handwringing that one might expect in a film set in the '50s about women who discover their love for other women - a lot of these things are not in 'Carol.'
I saw experimental film-makers teaching in college. They did what they wanted and didn't worry about the market, but the circumstances ended up offering me other possibilities.
In my research, all roads led back to Oscar. It's definitely in a way trying to understand the truly English element to glam-rock. It really does not come from American culture.
I worked with Jim James on my film 'I'm Not There' - he sang 'Goin' to Acapulco' with Calexico backing him up. We just hit it off, and it's such a beautiful moment in that film.
I love stories of love cropping up unexpectedly in life almost as a problem, as something you don't ask for. Something that messes everything up and makes you rethink everything.
I have always had an interest in performers who play against the most obvious of expectations and are able to find something secret, something withheld, and some level of restraint.
I felt 'Brokeback Mountain' re-imbued the love story with an authentic and unquestionable series of obstacles that these men faced. I think that's certainly true for 'Carol' as well.
Pop music can get inside us and enter our memory bubbles. It provides those true Proustian moments, unlocking sensations, unlocking our imaginations. Music inspired me as a filmmaker.
Films like 'Velvet Goldmine' are an accumulation of research and references. I create an almost random resource of connections and am constantly distilling that into narrative specifics.
I always bring it up to my lawyer every now and then. And another reason we have to revisit it is because there is a restoration going on right now for the film through UCLA and Sundance.
I'm always interested in what classic crime writers got into when they stepped away from the genre stuff they were known for. That's why 'Mildred Pierce' is like noir without any real crime.
I always learn a lot when I do so. You know, when you step out of your comfort zone and even your cynical zone, and open yourself up to what other people might experience and why they do so.
Serious films for grown-ups - 'Michael Clayton,' 'In the Valley of Elah,' 'A Mighty Heart' - these are big Hollywood films, but they have substance and craft and really beautiful performances.
By the time I finished 'Poison,' the New Queer Cinema was branded, and I was associated with this. In many ways, it formed me as a filmmaker, like as a feature filmmaker I never set out to be.
I've always been interested in visual art and used to be much more into theater when I was younger, or more knowledgeable about what's going on. And literature has played a big part in my life.
I do think that, yes, one should always be receptive to the fact that there are many different types of audiences, and they are not necessarily in a clean, reductive demographic like they once were.
Some directors do recut their films, but I don't if I disagree, and what you suffer is a less passionate marketing campaign, less investment in the film at the other end, which is... fine. I get it.
There are always things I have to remove. I might look at a shot for five months, when somebody new to the screening room will say, 'hey, there's a modern air conditioner in that window.' It's a process.
We yearn for the desire to triumph, and it almost never does in the greatest love stories because we're left yearning for it more in the end, and we wish the world were different as a result. I do love that.
The way I sort of approach my work is that the historical and socioeconomic and cultural worlds that the music is exploring dictate the visual experience and the way that we approach it specifically on film.
There's this homogenization, this big sucking motion in dominant society, to absorb all the disparate elements that define the margin or define the culture or define those who are thrust outside the status quo.
'Carol' takes place in the really early '50s, before Eisenhower has taken office. It's based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, her second and most autobiographical book and the only one outside of the crime milieu.
I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment. From a filmmaker's standpoint, that's so rare and pure in a way that I'm sure is way more complicated than it appears.
The film division at Amazon is made up of true cineastes who love movies and really want to try and provide opportunity for independent film visions to find their footing in a vastly shifting market. They love cinema.
Films like 'The Godfather,' 'The Exorcist,' 'Klute,' 'Chinatown,' 'Network,' and 'The Parallax View': They were drawn from the genre tradition, but they dressed down the stylistic telling of those traditions and genres.
It's only when you look back sometimes and you look at some people in your life and you're like, Oh my god, there was something so pure about that. The thing that kind of bugged me, maybe, is the thing that's so unique.
I started 'Carol' as I almost always do, by looking at films from the time, and they were less - they actually felt less relevant to me in terms of their bigness, although we do have some big '50s-type moments in 'Carol.'