Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Too many creative people don't wanna learn how to be technical, so what happens? They become dependent on technical people. Become technical. You can learn that. If you're creative and technical, you're unstoppable.
I like to keep my budgets at a certain price when I work for someone else, and even more so now that I'm working for myself, and use new technologies to deliver films that look like they have high production levels.
One of the big surprises for me about Einstein was... that he wasn't this big introvert; he was more like a novelist or a painter. It's amazing how close society came to not benefiting from Albert Einstein's genius.
I grew up with white friends, Asian friends - Vietnamese, Chinese, Pacific Islanders. I had Hispanic friends, not just Mexican friends, but Guatemalan friends, Honduran friends, and we knew the difference, you know?
The very fact of seeking specialization is probably what makes America so great in these two hundred years. But also, the sensation that somebody who wants to understand America doesn't really need to visit it much.
Great actors are people who just meld into the part without calling attention to the fact that they are so-and-so doing this part. They may never become huge stars, but will always, in memory, stay respected actors.
When I was young, my family used to go and stay in hotels on the south coast in places like Devon. I loved those holidays because they were with my brothers, who were away at school; I really looked forward to them.
I was a scared kid... I think I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way to find a way transferring my own private horrors to everyone else's lives. It was less of an escape and more of an exorcism.
I'm going to continue to make short films. I love making shorts. I don't have a boss. There's no boss telling me what I can and can't do. I find that it's incredibly creative and challenging to just keep doing that.
When you're doing a live-action movie, you have your day set up and you're going to do this shot and this shot, and eventually the sun is going to go down. It's a sequential race to whatever is going to end the day.
Mexico City is very different now than when I grew up, but I was in the streets all the time - though I was born to a middle-class neighborhood where there weren't a lot of gangs and things. I was always comfortable.
Directing non-actors is difficult. Directing actors in a foreign language is even more difficult. Directing non-actors in a language that you yourself don't understand is the craziest thing you can possibly think of.
'Biutiful' is a tough film. It doesn't make concessions to the vulgarity of light entertainment. It's not the kind of film that you see every day in the Cineplex. But as an artist, it's the thing that I needed to do.
Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula and it's up to us to try to change it... I feel like a preacher! But it's really true. I feel personally responsible for the future of American cinema. Me personally.
We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.
I feel it’s important to talk about the complex issues affecting us. And these are complex issues. I think it’s insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence.
Art removes boundaries and makes the world brighter. It is the common language for people all over the world. But politics are the opposite completely. Politicians, their very meaning is based on the lines they draw.
With the development of the web everything is instantaneous. Everything is about how quick you can get it. So with online gambling you don't have to travel to Vegas, Atlantic City, or anywhere in the world to gamble.
When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.
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 one's audience.
They do think it is a big summer movie and that's why they want to give it a great chance, but they don't want to go up against Spider-Man 2 or some of the other big movies, the $100 million films that are coming up.
I'd love to make films in England, and I tried to. I think there's a wealth of amazing talent and astonishing writing over here; there just seems to be more of a culture of developing films than actually making them.
The only one that got through was Jimmy Walker, because he plays the gas station attendant. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just that we were kind of purists at the time, and we didn't want any comedians.
I feel like the job of an artist is to confront their own darkness and their own demons and fears. And I want to make movies that feel human up on the screen. I don't really relate to dudes wearing spandex and capes.
I realised what a powerful position you are in if you own the rights to your film because then you control the distribution and I ended up getting 25 million viewers for McLibel and that's what it's all about for me.
I suppose they call me a woman's 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 am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them.
The audience too should be respected by being presented with a film as they remember it, and for those who have not seen it, as it was intended to be seen. Anything less is a degradation of the film and its audience.
The casting is very simple actually, but it is very important. You choose the best actor for the role, and you test them and you test them, and you bring them back, and you have to make sure the actors fit the roles.
If Richard Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the 'Great Art Form' would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.
Usually, you lose interest in a story beyond a certain point. But with Highway, there was something very subtle, yet something very influential. I intended Highway to be the first film that I ever made. Didnt happen.
For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.
I'm probably an overcompensating introvert. I live in Hollywood, but I don't go to parties where I have to work the room. I could do that, but I don't want to... I try and stay the same and live a fairly normal life.
The tree or the road - the ones I know of, finally they are the only characters I know really. The human characters I don't know. So there is both something I know and something I don't know. And I put them together.
We once believed we were auteurs but we weren't. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.
The trouble with Hollywood is that it has poisoned us. If you see a poster of a movie it is mainly the picture of a woman and a man. Always a love story. Yes. But it shouldn't be that way. It should be another (way).
I would be wary about working in the States because freedom is an important thing. I have made seven films and even on Alien Resurrection I had the freedom. I had to fight and struggle a bit but in the end I won out.
I have a very warm feeling about Kickstarter 'cause I think it's the best of what we can be. It's people who actually help out our fellow artists. We actually kind of go into our pocket for something. It's very rare.
I think that people are still trying to understand each other and overcome prejudices. And people are still, most important, loving each other. And that is today as it was yesterday and will be for another 200 years.
In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers. Laurie, Jamie Lee's character, was shy and somewhat repressed. And Michael Myers, the killer, is definitely repressed. They have certain similarities.
Comedy, I'm still in awe of. I think you need a comic genius somewhere in the mix. It's got to be the actor or someone. But the 'comic genius' actors are the darkest people on the planet - and that kind of scares me!
We had a pretty good life, growing up in Taiwan, and I think my dad really made a concerted effort to say hey, we're going to take a chance and go halfway around the world so that my kids can have more opportunities.
The nice thing about movies is that you can sort of steer your audience toward seeing that there's discomfort, but there's also this sense of, 'Well, we'll tolerate this weirdness because maybe it'll be interesting.'
If we can tell a good story with characters audiences can care about, I'd like to think that prejudices can fall aside and people can just experience the story and these characters for the human beings that they are.
Film is so much about that intensity of focus that there always needs to be some tension and some forward motion. The novel goes into a series of lovely observations about the world, but you've got to find the story.
When I was 16, I felt very relieved to discover cinema. It was like an island where I could see life and death from another perspective. Every young person should be interested in that island. It's a beautiful place.
I loved the tone and the characters. They're all very different and they're all very typical for their time. When you read the screenplay you feel like meeting them and getting them off the page and on to the screen.
'Twilight' was about a naive person who knew nothing of a certain world, basically discovering that this world existed and totally being indoctrinated into it and falling in love with a vampire, which is interesting.
I'm obsessed with New York. I just find it so remarkable. You really treasure this city when you go to different countries and you see that there is no mix. When you get back to the city, it's such an exciting place.
I realised that all one really had to do was just observe. Observe and slightly exaggerate, and you had comedy. Instead of creating a mythical premise for a stupid joke, I found playing off truth got the best result.