Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If I was American, I think I'd live in New York, because I like that East Coast mentality. There's nothing wrong with Hollywood. If you want to be a big time filmmaker, you should go to Hollywood.
Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you're time is over. They find you out and send you packing.
What you do is take the power [popularity] gives you - which is very temporary and minor but significant - and use it. The danger is that you use it on a vanity project that no one wants to watch.
Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors are controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.
I'm always looking for a way to surprise audiences. That's, I feel, my job as a director. I felt that Amy Adams playing a tough woman in 'The Fighter' was a surprise. People saw her as a princess.
No, in Lethal Weapon I was a taxi cab driver that Mel jumps in front of the taxi and pulls me out of the car and steals the taxi. Then I did some other indie driving for some of the car sequences.
It's funny: I rarely reference anything, and I'm one of those people that doesn't really spend much time in other people's worlds. I just try and create my own and make it as distinctive as I can.
Our necks are getting injured from looking down, and the movie screen gives you opportunity to look up, you know? It gives you an opportunity to possibly have a discussion with someone afterwards.
So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.
Movies used to be called the 'flicks' because they flickered badly: because 16 or 18 frames a second - which was those hand cranked movies on a single-bladed shutter - was really badly flickering.
For 120 minutes, 'Birdman' floats from comedy to surrealism to high drama to quiet brilliance. I felt so inspired by watching this movie. It reaches for the sky and never comes back down to earth.
Star Wars has always struck a chord with people. There are issues of loyalty, of friendship, of good and evil... The theme came from stories and ideas that have been around for thousands of years.
On a live-action movie, things happen that are unexpected. In animation, you have to fabricate the feeling. That takes a tremendous amount of nuance until the film becomes sentient and gives back.
I'm a movement Nazi. It used to be my way before. Now, in the last three projects. I found a way to let the actors find their comfort and still find the precision in the show. It's a change in me.
There are two types of producing deals, and I've had both. I've produced over 20 movies now. You are either watching in horror, as the cars take the curve in the grand prix, or you're enjoying it.
I did 'Mala Noche' as a way to do something that was outside of the system, because I was outside of the system, and I deliberately chose material that Hollywood wouldn't touch in a million years.
I like working with family and friends and people I admire. All my movies are filled with family members of some capacity. I think it means more when you have a personal relationship with someone.
Here's the thing that people don't understand: I don't really care. I've never been a careerist. It's not a strategy. I react to certain characters and story lines and specific mode of filmmaking.
We are not trying to solve the world's problems... However, even in the midst of hatred and killing, there are things worth living for. A wonderful encounter, or a thing of beauty can still exist.
Everything I've wanted to turn into a film becomes something new and different when it becomes a movie... Each time I work with an author, I say to them, 'A book and a movie are different things.'
[Dalton] Trumbo wrote this incredible pamphlet, almost on the level of Tom Paine's 'Common Sense,' called 'The Time of the Toad.' It's an exquisitely written treatise regarding the black list era.
I don't think I've succeeded in making any really good films. There are moments, scenes, whole movements that sing. It has all added up to a cinema of sorts, even though I'm still learning my art.
When you move handheld, and the director of photography has the courage to shoot with no lights, the set becomes a space of creativity and freedom where actors can move wherever they want to move.
There are different opinions across the Middle East of Al-Jazeera. They've been kicked out of Egypt and Jordan and then let back in; they've been totally banned from Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria.
Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.
To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'
In a movie you have all these logistical problems; all these practical problems. But you're also going to have people come who can do things that you can't do, and you get to direct their talents.
Catholics have more extreme sex lives because they're taught that pleasure is bad for you. Who thinks it's normal to kneel down to a naked man who's nailed to a cross? It's like a bad leather bar.
I just think we live in a world where people are so excited about the hot new thing, but you can't necessarily tell a story in one movie. With this platform, we can really dive deep and go for it.
Natural gas is a bridge fuel. But it's not a bridge - it's a gangplank. It's either a bridge in space or a bridge in time. The bridge in time we don't need. We have renewable technology right now.
I love sports. I was an athlete in high school, and my school was so small we didn't have a football team, so it's the one sport I didn't bother to learn the rules to because I never went to game.
I'm not super nostalgic for friendships I've lost along the way. I feel like, if they were truly meaningful and really special, they would still exist. I think we grow and change, and that's okay.
I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn’t planned; it was realism.
I went to Poland for the Warsaw Film Festival, and it was quite an intense experience. I didn't think it would be, but it did feel quite emotional to go back to this place I'd heard so much about.
'Iron Man' was this fun, poppy thing bound to make a zillion dollars. And we were the other side of a superhero movie. More complex with The Hulk being this complex character - that's what it was.
Live your life, experience something, and then you're going to have a lot of things to say. But if you hang around in Hollywood, then you're going to say the same thing as everyone else - nothing.
A long and productive career in the world of films is bound to be checkered with success and failures. You cannot have one without the other; the only way not to make a flop is not to make a film.
Becoming a writer, and then a director, was taking my creative life in my own hands, and wanting to have stories that I wanted to put out into the world - and I have fallen in love with directing.
I mean, it really has a lot to do with who is actually physically doing a lot of talking. And we've just noticed that as we've evolved we're still making all the decisions from this, like, "cave."
These men both publicly and privately have done so much for me. Without Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick I would be living in a little motel just around the corner here, trying to make ends meet.
People have been educated to expect answers, even before the questions come along. It's the TV principle. You offer three possible answers before the questions come to relax and calm the audience.
If you try to make a silent movie with a normal script and you just pull out the dialogue, you will have big problems with the actors because you will ask them to tell a story that you don't know.
I simply know what the actor's attitude should be and what he should say. He doesn't, because he can't see the relationship that begins to exist between his body and the other things in the scene.
There's a sadness to the human condition that I think music is good for. It gives a counterpoint to the visual beauty, and adds depth to pictures that they wouldn't have if the music wasn't there.
I actually don't have a great surplus of ideas. Some evolve very slowly, over many years, but I sort of trust that all of the interesting ones will become something that I eventually end up doing.
There is a lot of absurdity sometimes, not just in Mormonism but often in other religions that want to pretend that no bad happens in their church, rather than taking care of what bad does happen.
When the small independent film, which depends on its artistic appeal rather than wide commercial distribution by an MPAA member, is now denied access, the playing field becomes unfair and uneven.
There's that bubble of childhood that makes you innocently do anything. Then, when you get older, that pops, and you're aware of limitations and judgment and social pressures and things like that.
I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realising all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.
I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.