Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Music has always been important to me. Rhythm, in particular, features in most of the things I do. I stumbled recently upon an old notebook in which I'd written, 'Touch, timing and timbre... keys to the heart.' That just about says it all.
Unlike with any other art form, filmmakers have this unique web of festivals. There are hundreds. It is a democratic system in which you submit films, and if they are good enough, they play. The only barrier to entry is the submission fee.
When you're young, you want to make every kind of film: musicals, Westerns, horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small, personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters.
I don't consider myself bossy, but I do know what I want. You know, I have a gut feeling about a piece of material, but I've never envisioned myself as the director on top of the hill with a megaphone in my hand, screaming at 1,000 extras.
In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.
People often think that reporters write their own headlines. In fact, they almost never do. The people who do write headlines are the copy editors who are the front and last lines of quality-checking in a newspaper before it goes to print.
Some books that I've read on the Kindle, I've been like, 'I want that on my shelf.' Because it says, 'I'm the kind of person who has read this.' The kind of books that says, 'I'm serious and intellectual and historical and race-conscious.'
I am very direct and I tend to treat everyone exactly the same, which sometimes gets me in trouble because some movie stars feel like they should be treated differently. But, when you're dealing with good actors, they really appreciate it.
I'm not the most sophisticated person. I'm not the smartest person in the world. But, I know what makes me excited about life, from Spielberg movies to Michael Jackson music videos to cartoons on Saturday mornings, which made my childhood.
I get a lot of emotion from my family and my friends. I think it's just communicated in a different way. When my family feeds me, they're saying they love me. They pick me apart to show that they care. One look from my mother says so much.
RoboCop the first movie was fantastic. But even if there was no movie, the concept of RoboCop is brilliant, first because it lends itself to a lot of social criticism, but also because it poses a question, 'When do you lose your humanity?'
As a journalist, you have to have multiple sources and verifiable science, and when you've done that and satisfied the most skeptical voice in your head, you have an obligation to ride through the streets - let people know what's going on.
To me, sound is a crucial component to, really, any moviegoing experience, but particularly with suspense films or thrillers. I think you need the audience to become subtly really attuned to the soundscape in, like, this uncomfortable way.
One of the things that got me thinking during therapy is that they say that fear is only thoughts, and nothing will happen because thoughts will never be real. And my thesis, or joke, in film Antichrist, is that they really do become real.
With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.
I'm sure there are people who just assume we can't have hungry people in America because so many people are obese, but once you start to understand that a major cause of obesity is inadequate nutrition, it really changes that conversation.
It's funny, I started by making fake American movies, 'The Transporter' and stuff like that. I was shooting in France, but everything was in English. But then afterwards, I was looking at real French movies like the Jacques Audiard movies.
It's about storytelling. The story is told through images. So with the cast, I had to make sure that the emotions were readable without sound... I know some great actors, if you turn off the sound, you don't really know what they're saying
I am actually a resident of three worlds - of America, of India, and of Africa. I live in Uganda most of the year. It's extraordinary to have that worldview that is an expansive one rather than just looking at the world from where you sit.
If you just compare South Africans to the rest of the world, I think that white South Africans, and especially English-speaking white South Africans, are exactly the same as Brits or Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians or Americans.
That said, it was pretty awkward and a weird thing to shoot. Some women had a sense of humour about it and we'd laugh, but some were very serious and suspicious... like I might be doing something bad, or maybe they were just uncomfortable.
You have to think about good storytelling and characters first. Then hopefully, the rest of that stuff will follow, some more than others. But if you don't have a good film and strong characters, then you don't have anything down the road.
At Pixar, of course, we have all these people, and they're just used to our process now where it's a discussion; it's a discovery. It's not individual artists going and fussing off by themselves in isolation and then handing their work in.
The actors are in control, getting outrageous amounts of money. The reason they're getting this kind of money is because the studios don't know what else to do. They don't have a clue about what to do except to pay an actor a lot of money.
I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
I think that George Lucas' 'Star Wars' films are fantastic. What he's done, which I admire, is he has taken all the money and profit from those films and poured it into developing digital sound and surround sound, which we are using today.
When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.
'D' is about a guy who starts off somewhere, and he's a very thinking kind of a guy. He's not an emotional person; he doesn't react to situations. Instead, he's virtually choreographing the situations. So it's a development of a character.
When I make decisions based on other circumstances, things don't necessarily go so well. So sometimes, even if something seems commercially tempting, I've learned that if it's not what's in your heart, it's probably not what you should do.
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
It's not like you get up in the morning on the first day of shooting and say, 'I'm so smart today I'm going to determine every choice I make from now until a year and a half from now.' So it changes. You gain insights. The movie bucks you.
I'm a curious person. I pursue things based on what sparks my interest. I'm not thinking about what role I play. I don't have to be a movie director or this or that. I just want to be part of projects and places that are of interest to me.
When I occasionally indulge in sort of a 'look back' at highlights, it's so interesting - it almost never comes from an image on a set or even the Academy Awards. It's almost always a family trip or meeting and falling in love with Cheryl.
I think child stars have a leg up, actually, because they have an innate sense of what creative problem solving is all about. But to make a life out of it, you have to be ready to take on project after project. You have to like the action.
I think people who are horrifically abused as children and then start to repeat the same thing to their own offspring or to others, you start to see evil inherent. That's what the Catholic Church feels is necessary to exorcise, to cleanse.
Cinema through spectacle, through the entertainment of spectacle, tells the story of many actual problems in life. Because who ever doesn't want to read between the lines can just enjoy the entertainment and the show and can go home happy.
I am very close to my family, and there's something life-affirming about that. Even if you feel completely different from them and have totally different views on politics and ethics, you're still family and have that immediate acceptance.
When you spend your life acting and being other people, as opposed to being the one person that you are, you learn that life is gray sometimes, not black and white. That what you thought was true isn't necessarily true if you switch sides.
I've found that the people who play villains are the nicest people in the world, and people who play heroes are jerks. It's like people who play villains work out all their problems on screen, and then they're just really wonderful people.
If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn't matter whether you're bold or cowardly, or whether you're stupid or intelligent. Doesn't get you anywhere.
I never go to the monitor. I just look at the camera monitor and my favorite part of all of the directing, except for the writing and editing of it, is right when we're rolling and they do lines and I'll say "Try this, try this, try this."
I'm interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.
I never met Publo Picasso. I took pictures at the Festival d'Avignon, but I was too shy to ask to go in his studio. It does not look like me now, but I was very shy, and shy of men also. I think there was a world that frightened me totally.
When you're doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it's a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche.
A woman, I always say, should be like a good suspense movie: The more left to the imagination, the more excitement there is. This should be her aim - to create suspense, to let a man discover things about her without her having to tell him.
I only pay to take my son to the movies, because most of the time I only watch European movies, independent movies, or screen them privately. But I like to go to movies with my son because it's still fun; it reminds me of why I make movies.
It's been interesting to see how similar audiences in the East and West are, actually, and how it makes you realize that when politicians emphasize the differences between our cultures, it's usually because it benefits them more so than us.
I think the last one would have to be The Godfather because it was such a powerful story. There was lots of violence in it but I could take it because I thought there was a reality to it. It wasn't gratuitous, it was just these guys' story.
Chileans have this rumor that they're great soccer players, but I stunk as a soccer player. I always had to hide my nationality when they were picking teams because, just by the look of me, they would think that I was a great soccer player.
I always felt it is not good if you feel like you would know how to do something. I've made mistakes of telling people: I know how to do this. And it should feel dangerous. That is the only way to stay alert, to keep the adrenaline running.