Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When we were working on 'Taxi to the Dark Side,' we would purposefully not show it to certain people in the cutting room, because we would include a lot of horrible material and would need a fresh pespective. They would look at us and say, 'Are you out of your minds? You can't include that!'
Here's where the insurance companies really fail us. They over-pay hospitals, specialists and drug companies and then raise premiums to cover the costs. Further, when they pay hospitals 115% of what it should cost to care for a patient, they are paying for inefficiency that can be dangerous.
To me, regardless of who's in office, the government is strangled by business. And the government's priorities are dictated by business. I mean, why does America, even after healthcare reform, still not have free universal healthcare? I'm sure it has something to do with the insurance lobby.
I just love when a movie takes a break and gives you a poetic moment, but sometimes it's good when they just happen randomly. If your actors are really comfortable and you let the camera roll, sometimes things happen and you just see something that's visually iconic, or emotionally that way.
There's always been a lot of pressure and tension on the line. If 'Pi' didn't work out, I have no idea what my career would be. I don't think I would have gotten another shot at it. If 'Requiem for a Dream' didn't work out, they would have called me a 'one-hit wonder with a sophomore slump'.
You make a movie and it's like convincing people to go on an expedition with you. You think you know where it's going to end up, and you're hoping and guessing. But, when people trust you and get involved, based on that trust, it's a really nice feeling to be able to have everything pay off.
Directing ain't about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn't want to go to film school. I didn't know what the point was. The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two.
When you go and you tell a studio and that it's an ensemble, that doesn't mean a lot to them. But, my hats off to Paramount and Warner Brothers, because when we told them that these were the kinds of people that we want to get, across the board, they were unbelieveably enthusiastic about it.
When you write something, at first you might feel very defensive and protective of every single thing, but after a while, you just see what works and what doesn't. Sometimes you do test screenings, and an audience tells you that, or sometimes you eventually just go, 'Let's cut the joke out.'
Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves.
Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.
'Up the Junction' went on to inform my love of British social realism. It was the first film I saw of this ilk, a very stark, visceral reflection of England, an England I didn't necessarily feel a part of but that I knew was out there. You could almost smell the bread and butter and cabbage.
I don't think if you asked any of my childhood friends they would say that I had a weird childhood; they might say there weren't a lot of regular rules, the conversations in the house were always very open, dreams were a great thing to talk about, everybody was making something all the time.
I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.
When I first saw 'House on Haunted Hill' as a kid in Baltimore, and the skeleton went out on the wire, and the thousand kids in the audience went crazy... My whole life, I've tried to at least equal that cinema anarchy. I came close with the end of 'Pink Flamingos,' but I didn't tie with it.
There is no such thing as realistic dialogue. If you [simply recorded] the real conversation of any people and played it back from the stage, it would be impossible to listen to. It would be redundant . . . . The good dialogue writer is the one who can give you the impression of real speech.
I grew up as an artist. Science fiction allows for design and creatures and guns and all the stuff that I like as well. So I think most of the films I make, I'm sure, will be in that category. But I can also see myself making a film like 'Black Hawk Down,' and I could also totally do horror.
I think I'm a good writer. I think I have my own voice, which is unique to everyone, everyone has their own voice; if they would just write from a vulnerable embarrassing place, it's going to be universal and it's going to be entertaining. Because everyone is the same and everyone is unique.
Certainly, it includes that. I want the story to be interpreted in as many ways as possible, and of course, the bad blood aspect of it included. For instance, perhaps this is a story not about the hereditary nature of evil, but rather you could interpret it from a different perspective, too.
The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.
We're human beings, and we want stories. We're always going to be entertained and have our emotions touched by humanity and by things that we recognize in our own lives. So whilst every now and again we'll be happy to watch a bubblegum film, it's never gonna be the only things that get made.
The more real things get, the more like myths they become. There have always been myths, but the myths of earlier times were, Im convinced, bad ones, because they made people sick. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.
It [lighting the set up] is quite a process. It's like drawing. It's like being an artist. You pencil it in first, and then you ink it. When you're filming, it's like you're penciling it all in. You know where everything is going to go. But, that application of the final ink takes some time.
You never hear about a pit bull doing anything good in the media. And they have a stigma to them... and, in many ways, pit bulls are like young African-American males. Whenever you see us in the news, it's for getting shot and killed or shooting and killing somebody - for being a stereotype.
I don't like to use the word 'remake', I think reinterpretation is a better word. It's just a matter of respecting the source, and then trying to make your own film, and trying not to be inhibited by being so beholden to every single thing... We respect the source, but we make changes to it.
I basically just make films that interest me. And I don't want to make the same film twice, you know? But I've never found a franchise, so... I guess I'm lot poorer because of that, but... what astonishes me is that, at my age, I can still find things that interest me. And that's tremendous.
I guess the greatest cliché we've ever heard, but the most important words spoken, is, love, you know, love your neighbor and, as you would yourself. It's a biblical term, it's important, and it's embraced by every religion and yet it seems to be a far cry from what we're experiencing today.
There are three movies that I am exceptionally proud of in my life, and I rarely commit to a list of films that I like, that I've made... but these are the three films that I was passionately connected to. The first was 'ET,' the second 'Schindler's List,' and third is 'Saving Private Ryan.'
I find I like to work with a lot of the same actors, because I find that there's sort of shorthand there, and there is this unspoken trust, both ways. They trust me and I trust them. And I know what I'm going to get from them, to an extent. It's just fun, kind of creating this little family.
It is a very important film, Life And Nothing More, in that what was filmed was inspired by a journey I had made just three days after an earthquake. And I speak not only of the film itself but also of the experience of being in that place, where only three days before 50,000 people had died.
Some movies bring out the creativity in you. Every single audience member can become creative in the face of a particular movie. If you happen to like my films, it's because my films provide a bed for you on which you can find your creativity. The Hollywood movies do not provide that for you.
We should all die with a sharp, brusque heart attack. My father was lucky like that. One day he went hunting. He had a good day, he killed a lot of game, he was with his best friends. He said, "Ah, I'm still a good hunter." Then he said, "I don't feel well," and in 30 seconds it was all over.
In the case of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, an issue that is central to the film - torture - is so important that I feel I must say something. Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have been irresponsible and inaccurate in the way they have treated this issue in their film.
When violence is real and you flinch away from it, violence does not push people to try and imitate that. Often, we shun the violence that makes us flinch, because it disturbs us. And what makes us uncomfortable and disturbs us is not often bad. What disturbs us will not make us imitate that.
Sydney in general is eclectic. You can be on that brilliant blue ocean walk in the morning and then within 20 minutes you can be in a completely vast suburban sprawl or an Italian or Asian suburb, and it's that mix of people, it's that melting pot of people that give it its vital personality.
If you think of most murders as being between people who know each other, it's very easy to figure out who the killer is. But when you have a murder that appears random, where the person is not someone that's within the known radius of the victim, then it's much, much more difficult to solve.
I was always writing about the connection between man and nature. I grew up in a neighborhood that was right on the beach, but the beach was not like a beach you would imagine - there was a lot of pollution. And the most magical thing to me as a kid was sea glass, so I wrote about that a lot.
There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.
Every time you want to reset your set and pull walls out and reset the lighting, you're burning up half an hour to an hour, and when you're trying to keep to a schedule, you're constantly having to reassess what's worth it and what you're going to have to give up in order to keep on schedule.
I was writing short films and I was going through this really, really, really terrible end of a relationship that I didn't want to be going through. It was too much for me to process and all of a sudden I had this idea for my first feature film and I knew right away I had to start writing it.
There is no right way to live. You preclude a lot of life by trying to conform to that kind of ideal or stereotype. And it's a natural inclination in a world where it's so complex and so occasionally valueless, morally bankrupt, and chaotic that we want to reach back to something in our past.
I don't ever see movies by myself. I always see them with other people because I want to know what works. I want to know where they laugh. I want to know where they don't laugh. I want to know what they think about it afterwards because in the end that's what the art that I'm working with is.
What makes a date so dreadful is the weight of expectation attached to it. There is every chance that you may meet your soulmate, get married, have children and be buried side by side. There is an equal chance that the person you meet will look as if they've already been buried for some time.
I think we need to sort of broaden our definition of poetry, which maybe it's a good thing that they just gave this Nobel Prize to [Bob] Dylan because blurring the lines of song lyrics and also hip-hop for me is like some of the greatest uses - most innovative uses of language in my lifetime.
My generation remembered going to the movies as an event. We would see these things, we would bring them home, and we would think about them for years because it would take a long time before they would go on television where you could re-experience the fun that you had when you watched them.
An established property can be a blessing and a challenge. On one hand you have all those fans of the original that you can pick up with and continue on with but then you have a lot of people out there who haven't seen the first and might feel like this isn't a movie for them because of that.
It's remarkable to watch the president, with all the weight of his ability to command rhetoric with the bully pulpit behind him, make a clear speech about climate change and why that's so important for us all to focus on. And that is a rather remarkable thing to see. It's enormously powerful.
The director of 500 Days of Summer is doing the Spider-Man movie. That's not necessarily the movies I want to make, but it's all about the story, and if you connect to the story, and you feel you can tell that story better than anyone else, then great. Jon Favreau killed Iron Man, I loved it.
I'd like to make mistakes on my own dime and not have a herd of people tell me what I'm doing wrong. and I'm also still trying to find and develop my voice as a filmmaker, and I think that's easier to do on your own terms than trying to satisfy a bunch of people that are paying for the movie.
Morvern Callar's' a really weird film, in a sense, where I was trying to experiment with taking things in a different direction, and it kind of half works and it half doesn't. And I kind of felt with that film that perhaps I should have pushed it more into the realms of black comedy slightly.