Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's very painful to love someone who is wrestling with either an addiction or a mental illness because you want the best for them. And it seems so hard, and it's frustrating.
And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.
I watched a lot of silent movies. It's a very specific way of writing, which is more of a challenge than the directing. You have to describe images. It's easier to shoot them.
Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, There's a naked person outside!
Definitely, it would be foolish to try and make my Czech films here in America, as foolish as it is when some Czech filmmakers try to make movies of America in Czechoslovakia.
Well,I have a theory that men don't actually cry less than women,they just do it differently. Since we never saw our fathers cry,we are forced to invent our own unique method.
With the exception of 'Descent,' that was a very conscious thing to make an action or horror movie that was an all-female cast because I hadn't seen anything like that before.
I think that 'Elysium' the movie is unrealistic, with the space station and everything. I think 'Elysium' the metaphor is completely realistic: it's exactly where we're going.
I've got a reputation for doing a certain type of film: lads' movies that glamorise violence. The more my reputation as a bad boy grows, the more my life moves away from that.
The problem for me, with most movies for children, is that the filmmakers make the mistake of making it too simplistic. Where a child's world can be very complex, emotionally.
I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.
In the end, it's acting, it's not real. But every director will tell you that you have to create conditions that create tension, because tension is what makes drama feel real.
There are, after all, approaches to be made other than the dependable routes that massage sentimental expectations and provide easy opportunities for emotional identification.
When you're directing, you're right at the coal face, always exhausted, often emotional - and I'll enjoy being a couple of steps back from that and simply helping where I can.
There's such a deep, conservative feeling in 'The way Back.' You go, 'gosh, we've gotten narrow.' So at the moment I think there's a kind of tension, and it's gold rush fever.
With more time I like to see the actors find something of their own places, so I can get their own ideas before I put mine in. Given they have a better idea more often enough.
I became a real Shell Motor Oil expert, and I did this 25-minute film. It turned out really well and, as a result, they offered me more work and lots of commercials to direct.
When I was doing half-hour shows, I loved it and was preparing myself for the hour shows. Then when I did the hour shows, I was preparing myself for the specials and features.
As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.
People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at.
As I began making my feature films, it was a great adventure. It was about constructing something I saw in my head or I had designed on storyboards and capturing that on film.
Any time you talk about the look of the film, it's not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer.
Beginnings and endings are not interesting; audiences want the high point, which means you've got to get to it and get to it now - get the gun out fast, the clothes off quick.
It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren't directing it. But to do it while you're directing interferes with your concentration, and I wouldn't do that again.
I do all these various activities like painting and writing, comedy and films probably because not that I'm good at everything but because I'm not good at any of these things.
Sometimes I look at it [Valley of Violence] and go, "How did we do that?" But it's a credit to Ethan [Hawke], he had done White Fang, so Ethan is like, "Oh God, that's right."
Ultimately, there's always been a link between comic books and video games, and comic books and movies, and then basically all three steadily becoming this sort of transmedia.
If we knew exactly what animal life was like before the fall into sin and knew what nature was like before the law of entropy invaded it, we would already be living in heaven.
You can't have a helicopter fly over boiling lava. It would've exploded from the heat, and is just way too dangerous. The pilot of a helicopter would've flatly refused anyway.
Some of the ideas are kind of inspired by the songs, and I always want to use music to tell the story and give the movie a certain kind of mood. That's always essential to me.
You have to be aware of what the audience's expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren't looking.
A friend introduced me to Bob Shaye. He was one of the most remarkable men I've ever met. He was a Fulbright scholar, an excellent chef, and very knowledgeable about the arts.
We've tried to make a Superman movie where he does stuff and you go, 'Yeah, if I was Superman, that's what I'd do.' Even though he's an alien, he's more relatable, more human.
There are certainties in existence, but love is something much harder to define than light and dark, life and death. I think saying you are "like" someone in love sounds right.
My parents named me Arlette, and I changed it to Agnes when I was young. I didn't like it because I don't like names with 'ette' - you know, it looks like a little girl's name.
In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That's the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?
I sometimes think it's better to go with a bad movie that is true to a certain point of view than to take something and make people try to like it when they're not supposed to.
I don't understand why we give up genres, and the Western is a great genre. It's a part of the rich history of cinema and who we are as we've evolved as people, as a community.
I view every film as a commitment to undertake a long journey. I suppose this has to do with my need to leave no stone unturned, and sometimes to even dig deeper into the mine.
I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
Would it be nice to win a film award one day? Yes. But the critics are going to have to wait till I'm ready. Right now, my gift is making big movies that audiences want to see.
It's not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they're not connecting with the characters they are portraying.
There's nothing better than finishing something and looking at it. Whether it be a script or a movie, it's this complete little thing that now exists and is hopefully immortal.
I actively pursue experiences that are unlike any others that I've experienced and cultures that I don't know and unfamiliar places and unfamiliar history and things like that.
If New Yorkers reduced portion size to 16 ounces from 20 ounces for one sugary drink every two weeks, it would collectively save approximately 2.3 million pounds over one year.
Everybody is talking and everybody is trying to block things out, but eventually you just yell, "Action!," everybody starts moving, the camera starts going, and you get a take.
I pick out young people and teach them in less time than it would take me to alter the methods of people from the boards, and I get actors who look the parts they have to fill.
I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.
You live your life and it ends quite quickly and all you can do with it is pass it on decently to someone else. Whether directly or indirectly, behave decently to other people.
I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.