Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I always get role models, people from real life who've lived the lives of the characters, and talk it through together, me, them and the actor, a lot. That helps. We certainly have our disagreements. But in the end we trust each other.
Let's put it this way: art house theaters are vanishing. They have almost disappeared completely, and that means there's a shift in what audiences want to see. And they have to be aware of that and be realistic. It's as simple as that.
There was a period around Columbine when horror films were being kind of assailed by the government. The studios got very afraid that they were going to be sued, and studios at about that time were all being taken over by corporations.
I think that, for me, Superman just seemed to make a lot of sense to me. After doing 'Watchmen,' it was - you know that thing, you've got to know the rules before you can break them? There was something about that in making 'Watchmen.'
I really think that I don't mind people sleeping during my films, because I know that some very good films might prepare you for sleeping or falling asleep or snoozing. It's not to be taken badly at all. This is something I really mean.
The cavemen, when they saw the antelopes, they had to scratch them on to the caves because they needed to express the immediacy of what they were being affected by - and I love that. That is why I do what I do. I need to express myself.
Historically, there is a fight between the sound designer and the composer. You see them in the mixing room and they're always fighting because the composer wants the music to be heard and the sound designer wants the sound to be heard.
A lot of the films I like are more than fantasies - they're movies fascinated by the technology of space exploration, and they try to honor the laws of physics. I watched the Gregory Peck movie 'Marooned' over and over when I was a kid.
This is the thing I have with awards: If awards would make your movie more pretty, I would really get super excited about it. But your movie's done. You get awards, you don't get awards... They don't make your movie more ugly or pretty.
My father's family were liquidated during the Cultural Revolution in China because they were landowners. He was the only one to escape. I was born and brought up in Taiwan. But you absorb the trauma. My parents had no sense of security.
You could call it that [urban Western], I guess, you could certainly call it that. A lot of these types of films are, really, if you get down to the core most suspense thrillers in this genre, the Western is sort of the birth of it all.
We have the wrong impression of life. We think the very big incidents of our lives are consequences of huge dilemmas or major decisions. If we paid attention, we'd realize that the determining incidents in our lives are ordinary things.
I had a sort of classic moment when a friend of mine rang up and said she'd just been to a funeral, and in the middle of the eulogy, this kid had taken out the phone and had a whole proper text conversation - while everyone was weeping!
I think taking the biggest star in India and the biggest star in America, and putting them together in a movie that starts in America and ends up in India, or starts in India and goes to America. I think it would be a buddy cop formula.
My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.
I looked at early movies with Robert Redford, and I like how Robert, even though he had that automatic charisma and was a very verbal person, he always played those more silent characters and played within the scene and never overacted.
You can do anything you like - really - but this Sci-Fi is absolutely disciplined, it's Zen, you have to be absolutely focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and you then you can achieve when you get there. It's really weird!
You have the power to pause stuff and you have the power to go to the bathroom. You can do whatever you want in your own home. It's a much more relaxed thing. It's more like a book, it seems to me. That's kind of the way I watch movies.
Meditation is not a selfish thing. Even though you're diving in and experiencing the Self, you're not closing yourself off from the world. You're strengthening yourself, so that you can be more effective when you go back into the world.
I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That's why I love coffee shops and public places - I mean, they're all out there.
I was saying to myself that I would love to try it once, just one time, to know what it's like to make a movie in Hollywood. I was so curious because most of my favorite directors were there. There's a history; there's a way of working.
I'm not the greatest reader. I feel like I have a bit of dyslexia or something, and that's probably why I became a filmmaker. I have the need to communicate, the need to tell stories; and the need to understand stories led me to movies.
I've had a lot of coaches in my life, but I've only had a few very good ones. So, I try to take from the best ones and apply those to what I do and think and with anyone I work with in terms of how to motivate people and work with them.
You never look at the backside of a mirror because when you do, it'll affect your future because you're looking at yourself backwards. No, you're looking at your inner self and you don't recognize it because you've never seen it before.
Migration was not the only unpleasant experience I went though. I was born and lived in a country ruled by a brutal dictator whose wars never ended, and from an early age I was passionate about understanding the world through knowledge.
'Muppets' was very much an exercise in anti-CG and the anti-effects world. It was very much in camera. We wanted to create a world where tangible puppets walked around and talked to each other. You could touch them. You could meet them.
I mean, you have to be able - you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can't do it by yourself.
Blade Runner's just a noir at the end of the day. Rosemary's Baby is about the fear of having a child and how that gets in the way of a romantic relationship. Or whatever it is, and you add that extra element that blows your mind apart.
I'm not an analytical person, so it's not my job to even know what the hell the thing meant. It's not my problem. I'm just supposed to do it. Sometimes, people have explained things to me that I might have been semi-conscious of or not.
Well, the bottom line is that I'm extremely pleased with 'The Stupids.' I'm pleased that it's coming out, and it should look good. It's nice looking, with the colors and stuff. I made it for kids, and I really would like them to see it.
When I read a story or see something play out in front of me I say, how come nobody's made a movie or a television show out of this? This is something that belongs in the conversation. Certainly that's what interests me about a project.
Sometimes with these things all the pieces fall into place. I mean, we've been talking about this for years and we don't have the script now, but sometimes things fall into place very quickly, and if everything lines up it could happen.
What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.
You watch 'Malcolm X,' and then Netflix recommends 'B.A.P.S.,' and you're like, 'What? Those movies have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but OK.' They don't recommend other historical biopics - it's 'B.A.P.S.' and 'Ghost Dad.'
'Blue is the Warmest Colour' - I'm not a lesbian, I'm not French, I'm not a woman, but I saw so much of myself in those women and in those characters. I saw different parts of myself than I ever would've seen if I hadn't seen that film.
To me, the thing that sets us apart from so many other animal species is our ability to ask questions, investigate, gather information, come to our own conclusions, and sometimes depart from the pack, sometimes move away from the tribe.
There's a fashion for a macho style of filmmaking. How long can your longest take be? And shooting things in one shot. For me, if you can sort of disappear and make people feel that they are there, that involves massive amounts of work.
I think if you think of yourself as religious and if you're given a gift, some may not think it's that great a gift - some critics. But others might, you know. So you say, look - whether it's good, bad or indifferent, this is what I do.
What the Dalai Lama had to resolve was whether to stay in Tibet or leave. He wanted to stay, but staying would have meant the total destruction of Tibet, because he would have died and that would have ripped the heart out of his people.
Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.
The Coventry School Committee has been ahead of the curve in addressing the nutrition needs of our students. This committee is an extension of a process begun more than a year ago to ensure the foods we offer had high nutritional value.
When you look at the early-'30s movies, like King Kong, the codes of acting are very similar to those of silent movies. In some of the silent movies - the good ones, the ones done by the best directors - the acting is very, very natural
I've done a lot of dramedies in my career. You know, I started as a standup comic, and then the movies that I was doing, like 'Up Side of Anger' were kind of like - they're hard. They're hard to sell; they're hard to get made, you know.
There's always the sense that you should strike while the iron's hot and while there are all these opportunities, but that's not the way I get ideas. It has to be more organic, building up through living and through experiencing things.
When I came out, and for many years afterwards, it had become a habit for me to sit and read and read and read, like an obsession. I would take 20 books, and not come out until I'd finished them. It took me a while to change that habit.
I've always loved films, and I always felt like a storyteller. I left Norway after high school and moved to Manhattan and went to film school in Manhattan. That's when I really found out that this was my calling and what I wanted to do.
In the end, self-indulgence is very much about your ego and your vanity and your own id. The more you can indulge in it, the more pleasurable it becomes. And then when it feeds out, it's able to penetrate the mind and create a reaction.
I still get a lot of material but I find that as one gets older you get more fussy. You know you're going spend a year or a year and a half on this and you know there are only so many films in you so you get a little bit more selective.
I think the tricky balance, the most important thing more than the horror is to have a compelling story, compelling drama, a show about great characters that you care about and you want to come back every week to see what they're up to.
The reason why I always wanted to make an American film was because of the Western genre. It is something that I would very much like to make in the future, because it's very uniquely American, and I can't make a Western film in Korean.