Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I boxed 15 years in a club.
Actors don't have real value.
If people hate me they hate me.
Interview with a Vampire was lots of sex, so I'm not sure.
I think the Matrix effect is over-used and I don't do it anymore.
I produce for a low price and I sell it on my own to 80 countries.
My favourite game is Postal because it is so politically incorrect.
There are a lot of idiots on the Internet getting a lot of attention.
I play PC and Xbox games at home, and I just got a PSP as a birthday present.
We work very cost effective and I sell my movies in 100 territories on my own.
Agents are still asking for millions of dollars for actors that don't sell one ticket.
Homer is the nice side of Al Bundy with the same intellect. I really like him and Al Bundy.
I think Alone in the Dark was too much an action creature movie than a horror creature movie.
Alone is a much better film than House of the Dead and better than most horror movies out today.
Heart of America is a movie I'm very proud of. The young actors are great and the story has impact.
House was the first film where I had no influence on the script. I had to buy the script with the game rights.
I think without the harsh critics, I would maybe have not made progress. From BloodRayne on, I spent more time and money on the development.
The thing is, I think as a director or a writer or whatever, you have to have a vision. And you have to be maybe sometimes too early, somewhere.
Slater's a big star and he's been in the business a long time. He's always in a good mood and easygoing but he takes his character very seriously.
So if I get these actors for 30% of their price by coming in so late with an offer when they know they are not getting another offer then I do it this way.
I think video games are a great kind of entertainment. They have replaced a lot of games people normally play with their friends and neighbours, like Monopoly.
House of the Dead 2 I gave away. Alone in the Dark 2 I will also not do; even if the DVD movie made money. BloodRayne 2 in the Wild West is what I really want to do.
In The Name of the King is the right title. To be honest, I don't know who had the final idea for the title but I liked it and it has a strong connection to the movie's story.
We thought about it, what we want to tell, and I didn't want to move it directly into the Nazi times. I thought it's much more interesting to see how BloodRayne became BloodRayne.
I had $60,000 for my first movie. I was 33 before I made any money off of movies. I worked my ass off for free. To get that I'm "enemy number one" among young kids is a little absurd.
Now while the German money is over for Hollywood, I still have $80 million to make movies, and we will have two things coming up: less major movies and the price for actors will go down.
Any asshole can make a good movie for $100 million. I think it's way harder to make a movie with no money, and to start with no contacts and work your way up to international productions.
A movie like House of the Dead with around $7 million budget or Alone in the Dark with around $16 million budget are much easier to make profit than the typical $50 million major motion picture.
As a filmmaker, I get compared to people who have no clue how to do anything, but because of some Internet writing, it looks like they would actually be better filmmakers. I think this is absurd.
I want to be like, "Look at Postal like Quentin Tarantino did it. Brainwash yourself and convince yourself that Tarantino did it. Forget my name and enjoy the 100 minutes and then write your review."
So if you want to have a great video game-based movie you have to keep the mood of the game, use the normal character setup - but you have to flesh out the story and provide more background for the characters.
The Postal is a ruthless, Mad TV-type thing. We sent out a DVD to the South Park producers, and they liked the movie so much that we can say now, "It's like South Park with real actors" on the trailers and posters.
In the Seventies, a lot of executions via electric chair failed because of technical problems. Seed tells the true story of someone who survived and sought revenge. They buried him alive to make it seem he was dead.
Of course there are a lot of books that are interesting to make movies out of, but on the other hand, I think video games are also kind of like bestselling books for the younger generation, and the younger generation is the one going to the theaters.
Maybe you know it but it's not so easy to finance movies in total. And the reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government.
Take the hardcore gamers. The characters are way more real in the world of hardcore gamers who have played the game for hundreds of hours. They have the movie in their heads, they've built it on their own. These guys are always very disappointed in the movies.
Postal will be so politically incorrect and harsh, it's like a mirror to American society, and I don't think the movie will be well received by everybody. For example, Osama Bin Laden will be one of the lead characters - I think that shows the mood of the movie.
I think the harsh reviews helped, in that I spent way more energy in the preproduction and development. From this point of view, I'm very thankful for the harsh critics. I still think the critics were unnecessarily insulting in a lot of things, but I think it helped.
I like the direct contact. I want a lot of people that only know me through the mass media to learn more about what I'm doing, and to know that I'm an independent filmmaker and I'm not part of the Hollywood system. I'm coming from where they started. I'm not coming from a family with a lot of money.
A lot of the main audience thinks video game-based movies are always horror movies but it's totally not true. In video games you have adventure, sci-fi, horror, action and even comedy. I think that people should accept more that video games are kind of like the best-selling books of the new generation.
I always try to get games of different genres. This is the reason Postal is a comedy, and Far Cry is a real, pure action movie - like Die Hard on an island - and In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale was my opportunity to do my epic, Braveheart, Lord Of The Rings, Gladiator movie. I try not to repeat myself in genres too much.
Even if people hate my other movies, and hate me, or whatever, I think from this point of view, Postal is the most important movie after September 11. It's not respecting any edge, any border, any nation, any religion - it's an all-type offender. I think that only if everybody gets a little pissed about something then you will start thinking about your situation.
In Germany, people are saying, "George W. Bush is an asshole. Osama Bin Laden is an asshole." But then I make jokes about Auschwitz, and how the Germans are lederhosen-wearing sausage freaks - and they hate me for this! And I'm like, "You all are sitting there because you want to relax and have a nice evening, and now you're pissed because I put also a mirror in front of you."
Everybody says video-game adaptations are all the same, but I disagree. Normally, video-game adaptations are like Alone In The Dark, Resident Evil, Alien Vs. Predator - sci-fi creature stuff. But I think I've covered] a wide range of genres and time periods, like Transylvania in 1700 and now a Western with BlodRayne II, or adventure with Dungeon Siege, or comedy and satire with Postal.
You don't need any courage today in Germany to make a movie about the Nazi time. You get all the subsidies, you get the TV stations, you get the good reviews. But you need courage to kick in the balls all the people that are still hiding under the blanket, and to say, "Oh, Adolf Hitler was maybe not so bad." And with my little Nazi jokes in Postal, I offended the Germans in a harsh time.
I think a lot of people don't take you seriously if they hear it's a video-game-based movie, and a lot of press people don't write about you. With BloodRayne, a lot of serious newspaper people didn't actually even see the movie. They went online to see other reviews, and then wrote their own. I think comic-book-based movies have a better image. We see it with 300, Sin City, Spider-Man - they are A-list features, and video-game movies are B-list.
I get most of my reviews through e-mail, and then I go and read it and go on message boards to check it out. I want to see what's out there and to better estimate my position. I'm definitely happy that a lot of people are voting positively for Postal - especially the hundreds and hundreds who actually saw it. Still, there are a lot of people who didn't see it who are giving me only one point out of 10 because they hate me, and it has nothing to do with the movie.
We did casting in L.A. and a lot of people came against the advice of their agents. The agents said, "You shouldn't be in Postal, it will damage your career." So Zack Ward came to casting and played one of the cop parts, and then later I looked at the DVDs again and said, "This guy is Postal Dude." He's like white trailer trash. He's had a long time in the film industry, but no real success. He needs money; he's two-times divorced in real life. He said he works only to pay off his Philippine ex-wife.
The main point is that I think if we want the Earth to survive and everybody to have a positive future, we have to stop thinking in terms of religions and races. We have to face that we are all on the planet Earth together, and we have to figure out how we all survive. It makes no sense if we are all driving hybrid cars, but China pumps massive amounts of CO2 in the air. If we don't start working together and find solutions - if every country thinks only in terms of, "First we, then the other nations" - then we will fail.
I think it's better to be too early and disturb a few people - but have other people say it was necessary - than to do it way after the fact. We shouldn't forget that Charlie Chaplin did a movie about Hitler while Hitler was alive, and Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece Dr. Strangelove was during the McCarthy time, where everybody was a communist and McCarthy was flipping completely out. I think it's important to have a movie like Postal now, where we are on the peak of the Iraq War, on the peak of terrorist attacks, where everything is actually happening.