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There's also the issue of tech titans throwing their weight around in Washington and lobbying. There was just a Reuters poll that reported that more than half of Americans are concerned that tech companies are "encroaching too much on their lives." That's pretty major, considering these companies were universally loved not that long ago.
When my generation, those early days of television - I know I've been thinking about this lately - my two flashes of me as a little boy. One, I'm standing in front of the radio freaking out that Nat King Cole's singing 'Lady of Spain', just this stuff coming out of the radio, and Guy Williams singing 'Wild Horses' coming out of the radio.
My parents are artists; in their world, in the world of modern artists, you are supposed to just go into your studio and tune everything out, and your entire relationship with your work is supposed to be a super private one. That was the way to do it and you weren't deeply truly artistic if that wasn't the way you were engaging the press.
The fact is that I write under duress, often in my bed, often at the last minute. I'm kind of a binge writer I would say, which I don't support. I was always kind of that way. Probably the time I was the most regular as a writer was college. It was like, what else is there to do when you're living in the Midwest studying creative writing?
I studied law before I became a filmmaker, and I actually have a great belief in the justice system and the rule of law. I think it's the thing that separates us from animals. I really believe in the rule of law because it's an attempt to bring rational accountability to human behavior, which has a great capability of becoming irrational.
I'm not an American as you know, and to deliver "Jackie" today in the United States and understanding the role of women in society is changing and I hope it just gets better and better - and also in cinema. There's very few interesting roles today for women in cinema. It's getting better and stronger and, and I'm proud to be part of that.
Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything. You are sitting and seeing something moving in front of you, and then your mind goes into a trance. You are completely there. It's a real great art; it's not only a business. It's to open the mind, to understand this mystery within reality. This is why we need it.
One thing that struck me about going to those tech conferences was all the enthusiasm for free culture, and remixing, and social media, but people's greatest ambition was to be sponsored by Chipotle or something equivalent to that. It was this weird mix of collaborative, utopian claims and this total acquiescence to commercial imperatives.
I knew as a young boy that addiction and alcoholism afflict people - good, loving people - in profound ways, and that some people - usually from those rare "normal" families that I longed for as a child and as an adult wonder if they even exist - didn't understand this and sort of looked down their noses at people suffering with addiction.
My relationship with the journalists who covered the campaign was complicated. I often hid from the critical eye of their cameras and their omnipresent digital recorders, wary of the critique implicit in every captured moment. But I also grew to respect and understand their passion for their work, their love for the journey we were sharing.
I have wondered if I might be placed on a watch list of some sort by the government, though. I know that the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who is a friend and who has made documentaries about controversial Middle Eastern terrorists has had trouble at customs when she travels internationally - but nothing like that has happened to me.
When characters are drifting away from the "correct road", or in fact from any road they were supposed to follow, they lose control, they find other goals...and possibly their real selves. All these moments of changes, of self-questioning, are like an engine to the films I make - that's where lie the dynamics I'm interested in as a director.
If you're in a diabetic or prediabetic state, it's good to have medication to go on for a period of time. But simply by making the changes - get your sleep, 35 grams of fiber and a half-hour walk - your cholesterol will come down, your sugar will come down, and your blood pressure will come down. Only the minority of people can't control it.
I have a little bit of a pet peeve about how the middle class is depicted in movies. I feel like they tend to be either depicted in a very sentimental way, where everybody has a heart of gold except for the villains you're supposed to hiss at, or there's a sort of indie-style version... When it's done well, it's brilliant, it's 'Blue Velvet.'
The money to fund great things and innovations and programs is gone in our lifetime; it's all gone to debt. So we won't be able to solve global warming or have the transportation that we needed for the 21st century. We should be supporting people with great ideas, but it's gone, and now it's gotta be paid back with interest to banks in China.
Women have been trained in our culture and society to ask for what we want instead of taking what we want. We've been really indoctrinated with this culture of permission. I think it's true for women, and I think it's true for people of color. It's historic, and it's unfortunate and has somehow become part of our DNA. But that time has passed.
In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.'
Rather, it is the opening or the interruption that allows us to experience what is hidden, and to accept with our hearts our given situation. When film does this, when it subverts our absorption in the temporal and reveals the depths of our own reality, it opens us to a fuller sense of ourselves and our world. It is alive as a devotional form.
I used to work in TV and quit the job because I couldn't do it any more. I quite like taking my time over a film, five years is how long it takes me to work something out. And when you just do quick turnover, turnaround, I'm literally this is driving me mad, I want to find another living. I'll just have to find a creative way to tell the story.
Not to be to be a vulgar materialist or be too reductive, but all of that was completely absent from the conversation. Instead we were told it was a "revolutionary" moment, where these new tools would inevitably displace the old media dinosaur and that things would be democratized and wasn't it great we could all collaborate on these platforms.
To evoke the classic period of Italian cinema in a little film seemed like a great, fun thing to do. I had relations to that period. I had known Fellini and I had known Antonioni. I had made a movie with Antonioni and I had visited Fellini in his studios. So, it seemed like something worthwhile doing. You bring yourself to that mythical cinema.
Documentary film is the one place that our people can speak for themselves. I feel that the documentaries that I've been working on have been very valuable for the people, for our people to look at ourselves, at the situations, really facing it, and through that being able to make changes that really count for the future of our children to come.
Sometimes you'll have great actors who aren't comfortable with improvising. Which can get pretty frustrating. But every actor's coming from a different place and they have their own strengths and weaknesses and your job is to sell them as two people in the same world. Some of them have to have their hands held and some I just let loose entirely.
At a young age, boys learn that to express compassion or empathy is to show weakness. They hear confusing messages that force them to repress their emotions, establish hierarchies, and constantly prove their masculinity ... whether boys and later men have chosen to resist or conform to this masculine norm, there is loneliness, anxiety, and pain.
I come from the state of Michigan. We were the first English-speaking government in the world to outlaw the death penalty, back in the 1840s. We have never had, as a state, the death penalty in Michigan. I was raised with that, and even Republicans in Michigan, nobody would even think of putting a measure on the ballot to have the death penalty.
I came back to Haiti after the earthquake not to shoot a film, but to help and be a part of the rebuilding process, like all my fellow compatriots. I didn't come to shoot a film, but I became frustrated when I realized that my help was kind of useless. We all felt lost and helpless. And it's out of that frustration that I decided to shoot a film.
Look back on the utopian dreams of the previous century, or even the century before that, where people thought machines would ultimately give us a quality of life where our needs would be taken care of so we could all basically be artists together in the evening, after we had fished, hunted, raised cattle - or whatever it was Marx imagined for us.
If you walk into a room, and there is no one that's not like you there, whether it's a woman or a person of color, anyone that's different from you, you should be able to say this is a problem. We need allies in that room to say that video, this room, this company, these ideas, this film, this whatever, this is not right - this is not good enough.
I think music is just a wonderful ingredient that helps us understand a scene better. And certainly you can overuse music, and you can use the wrong music. I probably have been guilty of these things over time. But if you use music correctly as a friend of the theme, a friend of the narrative, ou can lend some terrific connective tissue to a film.
I prefer to take actors and put them in real settings and real locations and real situations rather than create artificial locations that serve the characters. It's just much easier when you are walking down the street with your actors to do that in a real street that's still open with people on it, rather than to close it off and bring in extras.
My father's mother was a secular Jew who died in Auschwitz. I only found out as an adult because my father never talked about it. He was a secularist and never defined himself in ethnic terms - partly, I think, because he was scared; partly out of the habit of not talking of such things; partly because he didn't like being defined by other people.
The population suffers from a fear of change, for their conditioning assumes a static identity, and challenging ones belief system, usually results in insult and apprehension, for being wrong is erroneously associated with failure. When in fact, to be proven wrong should be a celebrated, for it is elevating someone to a new level of understanding.
I don't think a lot of people would spot the video-game influences in '10 Cloverfield Lane.' People think it's just a Hitchcockian mystery. And I was heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, for sure. But for a generation prior to mine, that would be the sole influence. Since I grew up playing video games, I drew so much inspiration from that world.
Sundance [festival] is all your Hollywood buds and buddies and rolling out and high-fiving and "Hell, yeah. Here comes the movie," and in Venice, it's very elegant, and respectful...It's decadence. It's such a fun way to formalize a movie that is for us a down-and-dirty, gritty movie. And to see it with the red carpet, and rolling up in a Maserati.
New media has made it possible for filmmakers like me to get their message out. No big Hollywood studios are needed anymore to make and release a film. More and more people are watching movies and television online than going to the movie theater because of costs. This freedom gives me the opportunity to create the film I want to be seen and heard.
And how deeply do I let business considerations affect [screenwriting] choices that might otherwise be more or less esthetic? . . . Do I choose the upbeat rather than the downer ending because I know it will score better at the preview? Can the idea be sold in a single sentence? Can it compete with space aliens and tornadoes and missions impossible?
I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.
Everyone has complexes about their body or their ability and skills and dream of a rebirth into something different. I myself have always had that secret desire to become something completely different and enact revenge on certain things. So I do that through my movies. My desires become reality in the movie because it can't become real in real life.
So is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans? Sure. The Democrats say one thing ("Save the planet!") and then do another--quietly holding hands behind the scenes with the bastards who make this world a dirtier, meaner place. The Republicans just come right out and give the bastards a corner office in the West Wing. That's the difference.
I don't like making didactic, pedagogical documentaries based on standard formulas of narration: I'm only interested in the ambitious French tradition of the documentaire de création where the film, if successful, is not about something but that something itself. The goal is to incorporate areas of risk and paradox that we associate with cinematic art.
There is a sort of backlash of people who feel like you're not representing them accurately, and you want to say as elegantly as you can, "I wasn't trying to represent you I, was just doing what I could do to make being alive easier for me." And if it helped anyone or made them feel comforted in the process then it's the greatest thing you can ask for.
We have to prepare for what life could become in 40 years. We need to outline what is possible and what is impossible with the non-renewable resources of the Earth. What role will technological improvement play? Taking all this into account, what kind of life can we produce in the best way for 10 billion people? That's a problem that needs to be solved.
I'm interested in the way the whole cultural landscape can shift over time. Okay, this will seem like a silly example, but look at the whole discourse around "selling out," a concept people say is irrelevant because there's no more distinction between mainstream and underground, inside and outside (which I don't really believe, but that's another issue).
I brought in two genius guys from Korea. Guys who did my favorite movies like Oldboy and The Man from Nowhere. It was fun working with them. Even though they don't speak Japanese and I don't speak Korean, I knew from day one we were speaking the same language because they love my work and I love theirs. We instantly connected. There was zero frustration.
Climate definitely interests the climate crowd at some science magazines, talks or blogs. Some blogs are amazing. They will post one comment about one graph of temperature records from tree rings and get over a thousand comments. Which is boredom so purified and crystalized it's in an unadulterated form that could make even a robot want to commit suicide.
I believe water will be the defining crisis of our century — from droughts, storms, and floods to degrading water quality. We'll see major conflicts over water and the proliferation of water refugees. We inhabit a water planet, and unless we protect, manage, and restore that resource, the future will be a very different place from the one we imagine today.
I live part-time in a cabin in Colorado up in the mountains and part-time on a ranch in central Texas - but do I really know how to go brand a cow, or do I really know how to go rappelling down a cliff? No. I do the recreational, half-assed version of all these manly activities and then try to keep that kind of Zen masculinity, like, "I'm a man of nature."
The imagination wants to construct the new worlds, no? Creativity is a solution. If I ask you, "What is your goal in life? How many years do you have to live before to die? How many years do you have? And what you will do with these years you have?" You have pressure there. "How you will realize a good life? How? Tell me!" Then, you start to open your mind.
I seriously consider television to be the people's medium. Like the idea of seeing your parents naked or having somebody go down on you and worrying about whether you smell, or worrying about whether your body is weird or what goes across the face of a person who's supposed to be experiencing pleasure but isn't - those are things I'd love to normalize on TV.
Technology and television didn't dictate one path or the other - it was civil society and public policy intervening in creating alternative funding models. So I think that's one of the questions for our time: do we want to intervene in this model or completely acquiesce and leave it to the unfettered, not-actually-that-free market? Neither path is inevitable.