Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Summer blockbusters are very expensive to make. They have things that have to be expensive, such as 600 effects shots or CG characters that have to go a certain way, or a film design that is different but expensive.
Sometimes violence in a very real way is much faster and more impactful because it feels real and you're watching it happen and you're watching your star do these things, so it's not like he's doing superhero moves.
Every film I have made has corresponded to a very special moment of my life. I like to think that if someone wanted to reconstruct the story of my life, they can just see my movies and know what I have been through.
The battle between two men over a girl is the same as the fight for two men over a piece of land. It is all about desire. There is no difference between a love triangle and the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
As a director, you try to do things that are going to touch the human experience somehow, and emotions that mean something to people. You search for those projects and you hope to realize the potential in a project.
People say "the Americans" or "the United States," as if it was a kind of bloc. It's not. There's a lot of people thinking differently from other people in the U.S. This is very interesting to me and very important.
It takes two years on the stage for an actor or an actress to learn how to speak correctly and to manage his voice properly, and it takes about ten years to master the subtle art of being able to hold ones audience.
Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you'd call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days. So I don't know what my future is. I don't have a clue what I'm going to be able to do in the world of cinema.
Consciousness-based education, which I am helping to promote, is basically the same education that good schools are giving today with Transcendental Meditation added for the students, teachers, staff, and principal.
I think that commercials can really ruin a song. You know that the person sold the song for a good deal of money, and that was the tradeoff. But, music and picture can marry in a beautiful way, and the reverse also.
Film is always a fight because you're the person, as the director, with a clear picture in your head of what you think is really exciting, and you're just trying to convince a bunch of other people to buy into that.
I think we grew up thinking that the funniest things on TV were the old, serious movies. I always liked the Marx Brothers, but the thing that always made us laugh were movies like Zero Hour. That's what inspired us.
Right now, I think I have time to be three things, in no particular order: a father, a husband, and a filmmaker. That's why I don't go out - I have no space for it. I feel like one of those main things would suffer.
Possession and exorcism is something that’s in every religion and every culture. It’s a real primal fear: Is the body a vessel for our spirits? What happens if something else takes over it? Where does the spirit go?
Possession and exorcism is something that's in every religion and every culture. It's a real primal fear: Is the body a vessel for our spirits? What happens if something else takes over it? Where does the spirit go?
What I remember most about the 'Road' movies is my enjoyment at watching the two characters sparring with each other. But more important than that was my feeling that Hope and Crosby were enjoying the sparring, too.
I suppose they call me a womans director because there were all these movie queens in the old days, and I directed most of them. But I also directed Jack Barrymore and Ronald Colman and James Stewart, to name a few.
I see myself as a perennial expatriate because, frankly, I don't think I fit comfortably in any conventional form of filmmaking, and I feel at the same time, depending on the project, I fit into many different ones.
I knew from an early age that people didn't see the different sides of me. I formulated a kind of bi-cultural identity quite early, and I was always very comfortable with it, but I knew people didn't quite see that.
You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.
I went to Europe in '52 or '53, and when I came back, I stopped in New York. I remember looking out of a window on a glorious October morning and there was New York. And I thought, 'I'm coming here. This is for me.'
'Looper' is about what your 55-year-old self would tell your 25-year-old self over a cup of coffee. It's about finding love in the third act of your life. It's about overcoming trauma and the idea of true sacrifice.
In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!
We are in the twentieth or the twenty-first century, but all the thinking, if you speak to one of those people keen on technology - you see that all their thinking is two centuries old. In cinema, you can show this.
If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
'Pride' is my first film with a happy ending. Before, I naively thought they were a cop-out, but now I've come to believe that happy endings and wish fulfilment are an incredibly important part of our cultural life.
When James Cameron brought me the script, which I developed with both Cameron and Jay Cocks, I wanted to make it a thriller, an action film, but with a conscience, and I found that it had elements of social realism.
The old Craven Cottage stadium at Fulham, before they built the river stand; that was a great place to watch football. When the football wasn't very good, people used to turn around and watch the boats on the river.
If you're going to photograph skateboarders you can't run after them, you've got to learn how to skate. So at about 50 years old I learned how to skate, and skate fast enough to keep up with them and hold my camera.
There is no creative expression of artistic value that has ever been produced by ex-drunkards and ex-drug-addicts. Who the hell would bother with a Rolling Stones without booze or with a Jimi Hendrix without heroin?
It feels like there are two very different parts to making movies. There's the making of it and then there's the putting out of it - and I like the making of the movies a lot more than putting it out into the world.
I look for a thematic idea running through my movies and I see that it's the outsider struggling for recognition. I realize that all my life I've been an outsider, and above all, being lonely but never realizing it.
It's a fact that people who are in a weakened position, whether physically or mentally, have this perception of the outer world as threatening. Everything that is unexpected or unknown is seen as a potential danger.
I had a lot of encouragement and tolerance from my parents, but I also have many friends who didn't get that from their parents and in a way they have more strength from spending years where nobody believed in them.
Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.
I am at home in many cultures. I live actively in three continents and I've done that for most of my life, so I just make films as I see the world, and that happens to speak to people. I do things that I want to do.
He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs.
Just in the past few years - since I've been making movies, which isn't a very long time - you now have a culture that is fascinated and informed about the box office in a way that sometimes filmmakers weren't even.
When you're editing the film, you use a temp track. So you're putting music in there for a rough cut to keep track of what's going on. It can be a hindrance if wrong, it can be an enormous asset if you get it right.
I love films. I love fiction films, too. I do. I love making them, but it has to be the right one. Hopefully, I'll never become a director for hire. It's horrible to make a film that you're not really interested in.
My ego is nothing - look what Alexander the Great achieved. And I felt he was a figure outside time, a figure we don't even understand, because he's frankly pre-Christian, and his concepts of honor go back to Homer.
I remember being taught in school that you would underline things that you liked. I remember just underlining everything as a kid, thinking, 'This has all gotta be important!' I would just underline the whole thing!
My father, who was a good deal older than my mother, had basically grown up with silent films; sound didn't arrive until he was 30 years old. So he took me to see silent pictures at MoMA when I was 5 or 6 years old.
I know this is silly, it's shallow, it's bad, I wish I wasn't this way-but if I meet a girl with no teeth, I just don't want to date her. It's creepy of me, I wish I was a bigger person, but that's my real turn-off.
The smallest detail can contribute to the whole, I think particularly with emotion, you want it to be as authentic as it can, whether its a artifact or a theatrical event. But the whole is the sum of so many images.
I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.
Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them.
Scale is very easy actually. Put a camera on a jib or a drone and get bloody big shots on big sets, it's very easy. But then you're distracted. If you're looking at the shot, you aren't following the story any more.
There was not a lot of dialogue. The titles were just to keep you up. It's the visual stimulation that hits the audience. That's the reason for film. Otherwise, we might as well turn the light out and call it radio.
Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc...) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create