If I just know in my gut that a film is going to work, I'll fight to the death over it, and I convince myself. When a movie is purely a money job, the film doesn't have the same sort of intensity, and the audience almost senses it, at least that's the way I perceive it. So, yeah, the idea is to do something that you truly, truly believe in.

I thought I was okay in my first film, and then I was really, really bad in some films. I really cringe when I see some of my scenes. There's a scene in one film where a dog is biting me; the expressions I have made should be qualified as the most over-acted scene in the history of the cinema. The dog's expressions were more real than mine.

It'll be the Internet and piracy that will kill film. There's a philosophy that the Internet should be free, but the reality is that piracy will destroy the film industry and film as an art form because it's expensive to make a movie. Maybe you'll have funky little independent movies, and it'll go back and then start up again some other way.

With comics, you don't have to worry so much about budgetary constraints. In film and television, however fanciful you want to be, someone can come up to you and go, 'Okay, this is going to cost X amount of dollars, and we only have so many days to film this.' With graphic novels, you can have that alien invasion you've always wanted to see.

I lived in Italy for quite a while and married an Italian woman. While there, I immersed myself in the complete culture: the music, art, literature, film, food, and history. It's easy to fall in love with. As a country, Italy does a good job of holding onto its rich traditions and culture. There's a real lack of embracing history in America.

I think I'm a story-based artiste. So I would opt for the performance-oriented role. I usually go by intuition while choosing a script. Also, I do not analyse my performance, nor do I bother about how my film has been performing at the box office. I personally love challenges and am game for taking up things which I haven't attempted before.

Usually, I have in mind what I want to do. I shoot pretty economically, so I'm not shooting tons of stuff that I could change, all that much. I'll cut something or add a little something back, but not too much. This is maybe the producer part of me, but I'm always worried about the budget, so I shoot what I know I need to shoot for the film.

I've worked with actors before where I was like, this is not working, and then I've seen their work on the screen and I've been like, Wow, that was a really great performance. Because there are a lot of elements with film. It's not like stage. It's not a kind of performance art anymore; it's a highly tuned kind of collaboration - a symphony.

Scheduled shipping is one of many inventions that has made New York a global capital of innovation and creativity - from Willis Carrier's invention of air conditioning in Buffalo and George Eastman's breakthrough film technology in Rochester to the rise of hip-hop in the South Bronx and the world's first cell phone call in Midtown Manhattan.

I know that Madonna is not a first-time filmmaker, but I have worked with a lot of first time filmmakers and I have worked with a lot of inexperienced film directors so that never has particularly worried me - I find it quite exciting - but I have never worked with a director who has had so little experience of directing who was so prepared.

Here is my prescription to heal all wounds. Watch the film 'Funny Girl' at least five times, eat at least 45 chocolate bars, and hang out with all those friends you blew off to hang out with your ex. I truly believe that, through a combination of Nutella, old pals and Barbra Streisand, we can achieve happiness and, very probably, world peace.

The body moves through space every day, and in architecture in cities that can be orchestrated. Not in a dictatorial fashion, but in a way of creating options, open-ended sort of personal itineraries within a building. And I see that as akin to cinematography or choreography, where episodic movement, episodic moments, occur in dance and film.

Working on 'The War Room' was a thrill, not only because we were given such exquisite access to the nerve center of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, but for me personally, it was so exciting to be producing my first film and working with documentary filmmaking legends D.A. Pannebaker and Chris Hegedus, who were the film's directors.

At the beginning, Edo was a photographer, and I was more of a talent scout and doing styling and modelling. Then all of a sudden, in 1977, he gave me a Polaroid camera, and I discovered that instead of having to go to a lab and develop the film, I could just take a click and get a picture! It was genius, and I was very good at manipulating it.

Usually, companies, when they approach other people to do VR, they're like, 'We're gonna offer a virtual reality experience' - to me, that usually means they're gonna put a bunch of 360° cameras in a room, film something, and wrap the video in a sphere so you can head-track and look around. To me, that's not virtual reality. That's 360° video.

Look at Charlotte Gainsbourg, in the Lars von Trier film Antichrist. She's unbelievable. She doesn't act; she's there. She's great. And you love her for that, because it's so daring, what she has to do. And she does it as if it is nothing. I think she's brave. I fell in love with her when I saw that film. She is a revelation. Total revelation.

I made one contribution to a film about the 11th of September: there were 11 directors and everyone had a different take on that. Some I thought were valid and some less so, but there was a substantial point that knitted all the films together - a comment on the bombing of the World Trade Center - so there was something to get your teeth into.

Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them - he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton - and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond.

We try to guide with a light touch. Sometimes we can be helpful, and my goal with my team, both on the series side and on the film side, is that the collaboration should always be invited. In other words, we're not looking to impose our view on the filmmaker; we hire a storyteller because we love the story, and we love their ability to tell it.

Being an actor in TV or movies is different. A film or TV actor, if put in theatre, won't know certain dimensions, while a theatre actor won't know certain things when he comes before the camera. So I think a film actor can learn emoting from this theatre counterpart, while the theatre actor can learn about camera techniques from the film actor.

Film is a pretty poor medium to deliver a message. I'm not trying to do that. I'm just trying to ask a lot of questions and hopefully you can draw your own conclusions about whatever meaning might be there or what point there is; but I was conscious of wanting to create something that for a lack of a better word had a positivity and earned that.

Certainly what constitutes a stage actor, what constitutes a film actor, I don't even know what that is. And both things are very accurate, in a sense. In terms of people's needs to concentrate on race, I wonder if it's completely necessary, but it's not something that is so dynamically relevant to me that I feel it should be one thing or another.

My life is one that I've aimed for - I've always wanted to be an actor who worked in film and television and was able to provide for himself and his family. That was always a goal of mine. Now that I'm doing that, I think we have this idea, "Once that's achieved, all complaints will leave and I will be happy and be filled!" And I didn't have that.

If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it. We didn't have to do any alterations for Broadway. I was supposed to go a fortnight before it opened to alter anything that was necessary and there was nothing really.

When I make film music, I'm a filmmaker first and foremost. It's about serving the needs of the film. You're telling a story; in a way, you stop becoming a composer and become a storyteller instead. You tell the story with the most appropriate themes. How you approach these things is a very personal matter, but your goal is to tell the story first.

Even before the economic crisis in Greece there was no structure for making films - no proper industry, and the structure didn't help filmmakers at all. So filmmakers had to help each other, and make very, very low-budget films. Now with the crisis, things got a bit worse, but filmmakers are still going to be making films. It didn't change that much.

I'm definitely a big believer in the notion that a heightened style can get you closer to an authentic human experience than so-called realism on film. There are films I love that have kind of a muted or realistic style, but for me on any given day I have more moments during the course of a day that feel like a Fellini movie than I do a Cassavettes movie.

The great thing about television is that you get to tell, like with "The Walking Dead", 16 hours worth of character-driven storytelling in less time than it takes to make a feature film. So, it really is a medium at least for storytellers who are passionate about not only the genre but also the character-driven genre stories. It's probably a better medium.

Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism. I feel formally that I've scratched the surface of something very important about the nature of nonfiction film, about what we're very rarely honest about: When you film anybody, they start performing.

Hollywood is no longer the top. I love going to the cinema. I've always adored the idea of being in great, epic films. But they just don't really exist anymore. It's a real shame. There's great auteurs that create small movies, but it's really hard for anyone to see them, and for them to make any sort of money, or for them even to be made in the first place.

When it comes to identity, that was an issue that plagued me for a lot of my life. It's something that I wanted to tap into. Film can really take you to other places, and sometimes that's necessary to understand your own identity or someone else's identity or just the issue of identity, in general. It takes you. It's borderless. It's boundless. It's universal.

Various studios are still shooting on film with digital grain and the DI negatives, it's not ideal. We should really be all film or all digital. But that being said, the old way of graining in the camera, now you can make changes like a painter. It's dangerous because you can ruin the film, you can over-fiddle. We've all seen films and gone 'what the hell is that?'

I got into television criticism because I thought it would be easier than film criticism. Film, you had to know 100 years of history, and TV you only had to know 40 when I started. And I thought, "Well, that's going to be so much easier." But film stayed pretty much the same. And television has changed so many times that my head hurts. So I made the wrong call there.

I find most American films annoy me because their third act tends to be tying up loose ends and returning to moral values and killing the monster. I think most of the scripts I read to tend to go in that direction and I find that very, very unsatisfying. I want the stories to have loose ends and to pose some questions - or even say things that aren't too comfortable.

Clive [Oppenheimer] and I figured out that I'm the only one probably in the film industry who is clinically sane. I say that as a joke, but there's a grain of truth to it. I'm not a stupid daredevil who jumps into the crater of the volcano to get the closest close-up, I'm not one of those. And you have to be aware that you have a crew with you and you are responsible.

Richard Donner made great movies. Seminal movies. The Academy, though, and we have to be careful here, should recognize popular films. Popular films are what make it all work. There was a time when popular movies were commercial movies, and they were good movies, and they had to be good movies. There was no segregation between good independent films and popular movies.

Well, there's two things I have criteria for doing a film: The script, which is the story, and the filmmaker, and it's a filmmaker's medium. I like really strong directors, and so when I do a film, I'm out there to serve the director, really, which is in turn to serve the script, to serve the director cause he's the one making the film. I relied on Todd Haynes for that.

I'm planning some films in the U.K., and it will have pros and cons. It takes a lot more time to set up a film in the U.K., because you can't rely on much. In Greece, friends show up and bring what they can and you make the film. Well, that's a bit simpler than how it really is. But when you make a film with proper industries, it takes more time to synch all these things.

We had a great producing staff and great filmmakers, but for me, my mission , as a producer, was to make sure that the creators were happy with the film Death Note and that their voices were heard. I felt, if the creators were proud and happy with the film, then in turn, the fans would be proud and happy with the film because the creators know the fan base, inside and out.

I feel like a lot of the films I do, part of the reason I like doing them is I'm not 100 percent sure what it's going to be. It's exciting. I read an equal amount of very generic scripts, and you kind of know exactly what those are and that doesn't whet my appetite. I already know what it is or I already know what the character is. It's just a lot harder to get interested.

Independent films will probably kill themselves off by virtue of their own success. With a crossover hit like PULP FICTION, the criteria by which art-house movies are produced and marketed and exploited have changed. With studio money and overheads and budgets and deal-making machinery, a certain kind of narrative structure and popcorn-type payoff start infusing themselves.

Most of us who got into film industry in early 2000s weren't prepared for the constant vigilance that being a celebrity requires, and there's no school for learning how to handle it well or gracefully. It's a hard thing to figure out. A lot of people don't deal with it well because they're either too paranoid or they're doing things they probably shouldn't be doing in public.

Whatever I am, I'm not as bad as the person that read the novel before watching the film. I'll enjoy whatever they [producers] are putting in front of me. If they made an attempt to get things right, then I'll criticize them for what they got wrong. If they made no attempt to get things right, and yet they stumble on something that's right, I'll comment on what they got right.

If I'm ever working on a set and anyone talks about a master shot, I say there is no master shot. Before I even went to film school, I learned about movies by being in a British feature film, where everything was shot master shot, mid-shot, close-up. But I reject the idea of a master shot. You don't shoot everything mechanically; you find imaginative ways that serve the action.

There is still so much that I want to see and do, but for me, it's the pure satisfaction of doing what you really want. I always had a problem doing things that I didn't want to do. I don't have a problem when my director says: "Don't do it like this; I want it like this." But generally in life, I like to do what I want, and for me the best way is through acting and making films.

I had a really regular progression--and this is really pleasant, I think--because I had small parts in TV movies, then bigger parts in TV movies, and then small parts in films. And I think this allows you to get...experience of the set and to get familiar with [the process]. And as I had a really slow progression, I think it really helped me to stay lucid and not get carried away.

I had never met an actress or an actor when I thought that I might like to be one. I had never been around people in show business or from the theater or from movies or anything. And I say that as an encouragement, I don't know some people who want to be doing what I'm doing or be involved in film. You don't have to be from it to get interested and get involved. I certainly wasn't.

Films take too long. There's too much BS, too much nonsense. If I want to do a play, I just call the theater, whether it's here, or in Paris or Mexico or Spain or London or whatever, and say, "I want to do this, are you interested?" They'll answer the next day. With a movie, it's all, "Oh, I see this film as blah blah blah." They don't know what you're talking about, they don't care.

The distinction between East and West is that the Western novel is very organized, it's very logical, there's a logical progression, there's a chronological progression, and there's a safety in that. Whereas if you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.

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