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Growing up sucks, doesn't it? I understand why people wouldn't want to get old - but it'd be one thing if we became a culture obsessed with eating right, doing yoga, going to therapy and becoming at one with ourselves. That be great. But we don't do that. We seem to be obsessed with all the wrong ways to stay young.
It was about the compelling need to make countries get along to prevent war, in contrast with the totally petty and selfish bullshit that drives the individuals who are supposedly in charge of these countries. It's hard to believe that these self-centered people have nuclear weapons that they can fire at any moment.
I will say it's great - that Method Man - Cliff Smith - plays a rapper in a laundromat who is working out some lyrics sort of to the rhythm of a washing machine. And something about hip-hop culture and hip-hop is the ability to use current language and slang and reference details of life is very, very strong for me.
The scientific doctrine of progress is destined to replace not only the myth of progress, but all other myths of human earthly destiny. It will inevitably become one of the cornerstones of man's theology, or whatever may be the future substitute for theology, and the most important external support for human ethics.
The creation of the island, or the impression of the island, as it changes in the mind of the character also came in to play... there was another very important collaborator, Rob Legato, on special visual effects. And then ultimately there's Thelma Schoonmaker, who keeps me focused during the editing of the picture.
I have a video store next to my apartment in Paris, and they still have most of their videos on VHS. A lot of people think Be Kind Rewind is set in the past because they just wipe this reality out of their head, but it is true that there are a lot of movies that don't exist on DVD. But I'm not like a big movie buff.
The family today counts for less and less. Why? Who knows - the growth of science, the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the world war we've made, the new philosophies we've created; certainly something is happening to man, so why go against it, why oblige this new man to live by the mechanisms and regulations of the past?
Improvisation has to do with exploring something like two brothers in a room together. You find out things about situations by discovering the things that they aren't saying. It's a way to explore scenes. Sometimes it's more useful than others, but it's always there to see if there's anything that you might improve.
I think one of the reasons younger people don't like older films, films made say before the '60s, is that they've never seen them on a big screen, ever. If you don't see a film on a big screen, you haven't really seen it. You've seen a version of it, but you haven't seen it. That's my feeling, but I'm old-fashioned.
When I want to tackle a story or a subject, I always ask myself three questions: Is it important to talk about that? Will it interest other people than just me? Can I live with that for three or four years because that's how long it takes to do the project, to write the script, and to direct it, and then to do this.
As the acting class was going on, I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I love movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.
You step forward and make it real for a start. You choose a sensible moment in history. Funnily enough, England was bankrupt and the moment is the death of Richard The Lionheart... Richard takes an arrow in the neck collecting a small debt from a small castle on his way home from the Crusades because he's penniless.
Instead of candidates hiring people, like yours truly, to create campaign media that works on both conscious and subconscious levels to sway the voting public, what if all TV ads were, by law, only allowed to feature the candidate, with, say, the American flag as the backdrop, alone, speaking directly to the camera?
To me there's very few actresses who've had twenty years experience who have that cyberpunk aesthetic already baked in. Scarlett Johansson comes from such edgy films from Lost in Translation to Under the Skin - she's got an incredible body of work and the attitude and the toughness of her really is to me, the Major.
I had more trouble than I had a sense of utility or satisfaction. But it served to occupy me and to keep me occupied in a field that I love - which was cinema - while I was waiting to realize the film that I wanted to do, which was Once Upon a Time in America, which took ten years of thinking and working to realize.
People ask me over and over how is it that I work with stars. How do you work with Barbra Streisand, with Paul Newman, with Al Pacino, with Sally Field, Jane Fonda, you work with all these people. Isn't this a problem? And it isn't a problem at all. It's terrific. It's great fun. And I don't know what the answer is.
Everyone does what they can to avoid thinking. Laziness is the most basic human trait. People don't want to think -- they can't make the connection between entertainment and thought, they want immediate kicks. People will not be human until they get pleasure from thought. Only a thinking person can be a full person.
I'm a very fortunate person. I get to choose the movies that I want to do. I have a lot of friends in this industry that don't get to do that. I grew up in L.A. A lot of my friends are actors so I realize every day how lucky I am to have this opportunity, so while I'm here, I'm going to try to do exactly what I want.
I remembered watching the film from Alfred Hitchcock, 'Dial M for Murder,' and he shot almost all of that movie in one room. There was a genius in what Hitchcock did by manipulating things in that room so that you could see the distances between things like the tables and the vases because of how he used perspective.
In my case what happened is that within about two weeks of beginning meditation, the anger already started to go away. My wife came to me and said, "What's going on?" and I said, "What are you talking about?" To which she replied, "This anger, where did it go?" I didn't even realize that my anger had been going away.
You know, you have Scorsese who worked with De Niro and - or DiCaprio. You have William Wyler who worked with Bette Davis. You have George Cukor who worked with Katharine Hepburn. I just - people get to be friends and then there's a - that's a - you can take risks together and each time out you take a different risk.
Trust me: you make a movie about time travel, and you know for a fact humans will never travel through time. The paradoxes that come up just from trying to tell a story with time travel really illuminates the fact that it's impossible. It will never happen. We can barely get through a movie that involves time travel.
You can pretend everything's fine, but if there's an unhappiness or you're not having sex or you're not communicating or you're made to feel third best in the house and you don't address it and you just try to put on a nice face and a smile, that kind of aggression and anger is going to come out in some sinister way.
I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.
There's so much work in making movies, it's so easy to tear one down. When I watch a movie, even one that I don't particularly enjoy, I'm constantly impressed at the work that's in it. I respect the craftsmen and women. I tolerate a lot of movies that maybe other people don't, just because I know what goes into them.
I believe nostalgia has many appearances and that it's not just the privilege of adults. I think children too can have nostalgia. It's one of mankind's most shared emotions. It's one of the things that makes us human. When you live, you lose things. It's a fact of life. So it's natural for everyone to have nostalgia.
I think talent decides everything. More than the method, what's important is the talent using it. There's nothing inherently wrong or right about a method, whether it be pencil drawings or 3-D CG. Pencil drawings don't have to go away, but those who continue to use the medium lack talent. So sadly, it will fade away.
I was very interested in politics in college and was heading to be a lawyer. I have a degree in economics and I was interested in it. I hadn't really gotten super serious about it and I'd done a lot of student politics in high school. I really think it would be interesting and fun and challenging to go into politics.
When you see all of the pandas in this movie [Kung Fu Panda 3], they are rolling because that is exactly what they do. Not only were we able to watch the pandas play but we had free range to walk around and get a feel for the architecture and get a sense of where they lived ,so there's a lot of firsthand exploration.
It is essential for evolution to become the central core of any educational system, because it is evolution, in the broad sense, that links inorganic nature with life, and the stars with the earth, and matter with mind, and animals with man. Human history is a continuation of biological evolution in a different form.
I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but feel incredibly lucky to be in the position I am now and to be able to play a small part in trying to support talented, aspiring young filmmakers out there through a program like 'Interpretations' who, like me, had the desire and passion, but no connections to the industry.
I think that idea that sort of our emotional self and our emotional life is a faucet that you turn on and off, and that we are in control of it entirely, that's a really appealing idea for a lot of people. But there are certainly the times where it's appealing to me, but it never quite works the way I hoped it would.
The film is therefore a form of science fiction, in which humans, beasts and machines are on the verge of extinction - 'sacred motors' linked together by a common fate and solidarity, slaves to an increasingly virtual world. A world from which visible machines, real experiences and actions are gradually disappearing.
When Cara [Delevingne] and Dane [DeHaan] arrived, I told their agent, "They need to know all this." I gave them the 600 pages. I said, "You have to learn everything. You're a cop. You need to know the names." I don't want him, when he meets an alien to go, "Whoa" like this. I want him to know if this guy is peaceful.
Either you're this, or you're that: either you're - if you're a Pakistani, you're a terrorist; if you're an American, you might be a militarist. Those kind of prisms that we see each other through are really stultifying, and they don't often show the complexity and the incredible warmth and encompassing of the world.
I think the reason you use an actor is if they are right for the role. Most of the high-profile stars tend to be good actors. That's probably what led to their fame. So if they are right for the movie, you can certainly use them. But I don't want to, not at all. Stardom and Hollywood overpower the ideas and the film.
I think that almost every scene was an exploration - it was never going to be just what’s on the page. So I know I was very lucky - we all were - to work with a cast of this caliber. These are extremely experienced and intelligent actors, who are also deeply emotional and - as you say - are also engaged in the world.
I've seen films that have made as much as $100, $200 million, but they're not films. They're images. They're flashes. They're many beautiful images, lots of things to look at. They capture you. But it's not a film. It's not something that involves you in a story. They go to cinema now to be blown away by the effects.
When I put something into motion, the creativity starts to make other people want to jump in, and then a lot of people get employed. I'm just like a shark, in that way. If I stop swimming, I'll die. But, it really is about that shared experience with people. I'm from theater, and that's really what theater feels like.
I was absolutely floored as a lot of people are but also I was reunited with ideas that I actually had as a teenager and these are ideas that I had put away as I approached college years because they were ridiculous on the face of it and when you talk to someone about living forever, they just dismiss you out of hand.
Sydney is rather like an arrogant lover. When it rains it can deny you its love and you can find it hard to relate to. It's not a place that's built to be rainy or cold. But when the sun comes out, it bats its eyelids, it's glamorous, beautiful, attractive, smart, and it's very hard to get away from its magnetic pull.
To force yourself out of the comfort zone, the main ingredient is trying to work in a world where you haven't been before, that you don't know the rules of. And that involves a lot of research, so you begin to see where the other people have been, but you are starting from as vulnerable and as low a point as possible.
Yeah as the director I consider myself to be the coach, and my actors are my players. So I have to show them how committed I am, but I also want to lead by example. I think whenever you make a film, you start out alone, and then slowly start - you have to be a magnet. You have to attract people to you, to the project.
When people think of biblical movies, they imagine sweeping epics like 'The Ten Commandments.' But 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' is essentially a documentary about Jesus. It made me aware of how real life and personal experience can create more breathtaking, sensitive cinema than more sophisticated techniques.
Maybe because I'm a child of the '80s, but for me, a sequel is a story that follows the previous one, and sometimes if you haven't seen the original, then you don't understand the second one. Like 'Back to the Future 2.' If you haven't seen the first one, you're not going to get anything out of 'Back to the Future 2.'
In 'Roma,' I wanted to get across the idea that underneath Rome today is ancient Rome. So close. I am always conscious of that, and it thrills me. Imagine being in a traffic jam at the Coliseum! Rome is the most wonderful movie set in the world... As was the case with many of my film ideas, it was inspired by a dream.
I'm not much of a math and science guy. I spent most of my time in school daydreaming and managed to turn it into a living. When I was making "Star Wars," I wasn't restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, "I'm going to create a world that's fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it."
In fact, I am a pessimist. But when I'm making a film, I don't want to transfer my pessimism onto children. I keep it at bay. I don't believe that adults should impose their vision of the world on children, children are very much capable of forming their own visions. There's no need to force our own visions onto them.
Well, Toronto, I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I've made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time - they are my audience. They're the people that I think about while I'm writing, directing, and editing. I specifically make movies for them.
We got the best actors imaginable [in Kung Fu Panda]. If we could have made a wish list I don't think there would anyone else we would have added. Yeah, we've been blessed with exactly how amazing a cast of actors we have. To have someone like Bryan Cranston, who is not just an amazing actor, but who has such a range.