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The supporting characters typically carry less story/plot weight - so you can be more broad and pushed with them. Supporting characters also take up less of the film's screen time. A short is a great opportunity for supporting characters to shine.
But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.
If a film is very clever and well-written, that's what gives you freedom as a director. Part of the freedom in directing, for me, is that I'm also the camera operator. That's the place where things are less rigid, where I can adjust as I go along.
Hospitals are places that you have to stay in for a long time, even if you are a visitor. Time doesn't seem to pass in the same way in hospitals as it does in other places. Time seems to almost not exist in the same way as it does in other places.
What do you want art to give you? What do you want cultural experience to give you? Shouldn't it be in-depth, profound experiences which have some satisfaction and can be retained in your four senses and your imagination for the rest of your life?
The children, each of those kids is in touch with nature and traditional aboriginal culture so a very important part of getting performances from them was just letting them be and trying to capture the unique spirituality that was in each of them.
I think the reason why we were able to actually get it made was that we were so extremely naive - we had no experience at all here. We didn't even know that you were supposed to have an agent. We didn't even have a lawyer. We didn't know one soul.
Scaring someone's the hardest thing to do, and that's why most of these scary movies are not scary. They're sick, but not scary. There's a lot of sickness out there, of people who then sit there and watch it, which I think is absolutely dismaying.
Busy people begrudge the days being short. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
For me, fantasy has always been a means of exploring reality: it explores the fact that your internal life, your dreams and the weird images and the things that come to you are things that are actually important tools for dealing with real issues.
'Night Watch' itself is a very Russian movie. It's impossible to imagine this kind of movie somewhere else: a movie with a depressing ending, a lot of inexplicable storylines, strange characters. It's a Russian reflection of American film culture.
I think by around the time I was about 8 or 9, the idea of filmmaking probably took hold. I made little Super 8 extravaganzas when I was a kid, the first being my own version of Romeo and Juliet, and where I played all the parts except for Juliet.
There's a darkness under 'The Hangover' because ultimately there's a missing person and it's not really that funny. There's a sort of darkness under it that I love, and still people are laughing as hard if not harder than they did in 'Old School.'
I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.
Roger Ebert was a very valiant soldier of cinema who passed away, and we miss him. It's over with serious discourse about cinema in the print media and on television. It has been replaced by celebrity news. So we are speaking in his spirit always.
You hear about bombings in other countries, or numbers like "10,000 people died" - you hear that number and you think, "Well, I saw that yesterday in a film, and that didn't look so bad." Younger viewers, in particular, lose perspective on reality.
All my films I have shot in chronological order - always. And the reason is that there's a moment that the screenplay is the notion of the film. But when you start doing a film... the work itself starts being transformed, and you have to surrender.
To make a movie, and we can call it a movie or we can call it a piece of art, to make a movie that has that much mass appeal what it is? What is it that makes kids in China want to see that movie [ 'Avatar'] and makes my dad want to see that movie.
In a way, the truth is that I was dreaming to do a movie in the United States just because, as a filmmaker, I always loved the idea of trying to make movies in a different culture, in a different way. It's always interesting to make a movie abroad.
I guess sci-fi was like my candy growing up. My dad always thought it was important for me to read an hour or two every night. And if I got stuck or didn't want to read, sci-fi was sort of the thing you'd give me to spur me on to read that evening.
I thought that Hollywood was just for geniuses and that directors come from three generations of directors. I was worried that I was not up to the challenge of making a movie. Then realized that all a director has to do is know what he wants to do.
You can be as rich, and famous, and powerful as you want to be, and it will not bring you happiness. That's said over and over and over, again. It's such a cliché that it hardly needs to be said, but people don't understand that it's actually true.
The language of the moment or, as it were, the language of the order in which we live, is the image. I felt that if I wanted to commune with the public, I should best do so through the language of image. It's a conscious embrace of a contradiction.
The good news is that the comics field is small enough and informal enough that once you have made a comic, you have achieved your dreams: you have broken into the comics industry. The problem with breaking in, though, is that staying in is harder.
I don't think American independent films have ever really been particularly experimental, except for the original guys from the '60s who were huge influences, like Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, and Stan van der Beek. They were the true independents.
I see things in a specific way. All the films are different. There are specific characters and scenes and locations and ideas. There are colors I want to see. There are movements and things ... The films are different, but the approach is the same.
When Nikita Khrushchev wrapped himself in the bloody mantle of the Czars he broke Hungary, he broke the little Communist parties over the western world, and he broke the hearts of many honest men who had trusted a little too far, a little too long.
I don't think in terms of what's going to be successful. I have plenty of friends who make very small movies and friends who make giant, $150 million blockbusters, and the thing that I really admire is, the ones who do it well do it very sincerely.
The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.
And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, 'We're going to develop twenty-five and maybe one's going to get made,' so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.
It is an incredibly hopeful experience watching communities come together and actually reassemble democracy. The democracy's been taken away from us. But they're reinventing democracy out there in rural Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, in Pittsburgh.
Daring to make films of any kind and thus invite the possibility of ridicule was an internal battle of mine for many years as I worked on the screenplay for what would become 'Dear White People' beginning at the end of George W. Bush's second term.
No one wanted to be my friend because of my lunchbox - because I never shared my lunchbox. One day the principal walked in and said, 'No one is friends with Karan Johar; who will be his friend?' My CEO today put his hand up there and said, he will.
I, of course, was born as if I was a movie star in my head. Even though I had nothing, in my head I was always royalty. My mother always said, 'I don't know where you came from'. I didn't have their value system. And I always lived beyond my means.
No political politicians on the board and stop sub-contracting anyway, which means getting out of Iraq. If anything needs to be policed, it needs to be done through a proper international body... not through us sub-contracting teams of mercenaries.
I just ended up focusing on film editing as I was getting my career started. I'm very passionate about editing and will continue to edit for the rest of my career, but it's not like that was all I did and then somehow I grew into directing a movie.
So the question never comes up. I love to work with actors who I feel really confident in knowing what I'm going to get from them. And making a movie is such a risk that it's comforting to build up a good support team in production as well as cast.
We've done things that are faster at times, but it's definitely different when we direct all the episodes because it's like we have to write them all, then shoot them all, then edit them all. So we have to just get ahead on those scripts basically.
Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It's all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it's diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They're supposed to help you, but too often they help you into your grave.
What I look for in a script is something that challenges me, something that breaks new ground, something that allows me to flex my director muscle. You have got to think fast in this business, you've got to keep reinventing yourself to stay on top.
Fundamentally, the way I work is exactly the same whether I'm making 'Whale Rider' or 'Mulan'. And those two stories are somewhat similar. They have interesting parallels, and it felt like I'd really come full circle, back to a story of leadership.
There's no real rules about what you do [while directing]; it's just you just use your instincts as to the pacing of a film and what is repetitive and what is the minimum amount you can get away with to tell the story, that scene didn't make it in.
That's a little homage in a way to that and also to create that sort of creepy atmosphere that Hitchcock did. Vertigo was one of his great movies that was shot right here in The City and it's about a woman and the psychological twists and so forth.
To me "King Kong" is a metaphor for America's fear of the black male. And to me that's obvious. All right? So I mean that was one of the first things I said when I was talking to a friend of mine after he saw Peter Jackson's version of "King Kong."
You know, the art films would usually be more, I mean the exploitation movies would usually be more lurid, but not that much more. I mean, actually back in those days that was what foreign films had. They had sex, they were selling Laura Antonelli.
When you're in the editing room, the dangerous thing is that it becomes like telling a joke again and again and again. Eventually, the joke starts to not be funny. So you have to be careful that you're not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I went back to Holland and I thought 'Ok, now I made so many movies in Hollywood, I know how special effects work, how to do action for not a lot of money, and I have all of these skills now.' It was something in Holland that nobody dared to touch.
I don't love balls and sleeping beauties, that kind of thing. I think the great thing about 'Snow White' is those images have scarred me since I was a child with the Queen, the mirror, the taking of the heart, the huntsman and the enchanted forest.
What I got, unconsciously, from admiring Fred Astaire was that he didn't want what he was doing to look difficult. What was difficult, in my opinion, was making it look so genuine, so effortless. I equally have tried to remain unseen on the screen.
My problem is that my imagination won't turn off. I wake up so excited I can't eat breakfast. I've never run out of energy. It's not like OPEC oil; I don't worry about a premium going on my energy. It's just always been there. I got it from my mom.