I met Tupac pretty much right after he did the movie 'Juice,' so he was already with Digital Underground, but he was on his own rise at this time. He was very humble, down to earth, a very cool guy.

The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is this - a movie star will say, 'How can I change the script to suit me?' and a movie actor will say. 'How can I change me to suit the script?'

Every movie, I complicate. I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching 'Pan's Labyrinth:' An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It's not easy.

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.

I started my career wanting to make a 'James Bond' movie, and I couldn't get hired! I made 'The Bourne Identity,' and ultimately the impact of that film was that it changed the 'James Bond' franchise.

I loved The Wind in the Willows. ... Walt Disney should be sued for cheapening it as he did. Imagine it, Mickey Mousing all those nice characters. I'm surprised he didn't do it with the New Testament.

Movies are a director's medium, and they end up getting less credit than actors. They get the flak if the movie doesn't do well, and the actor walks away with most of the credit if the film does well.

The first thing that inspires me is my mood, but I take inspiration from a lot of things: a rock song, a romantic movie or a specific lifestyle, like 1960s London and, of course, Italian 'dolce vita!'

people only ever offer you a great deal of money for rubbish. The greater the number of noughts on the cheque, the greater the crapular content of the movie; the better the work, the less you're paid.

When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go; they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.

You don't get music in your daily life, do you? Even in a movie, it's unnatural to have music. I always feel it's unnatural. But I want to make it not unnatural, to construct reality in another sense.

There's so much content online but so little respect for it. You could watch something for 20 minutes and switch to watch something else, which is not how a movie or series was intended to be watched.

The reason I took Early Edition - besides the fact that I liked it - was that it enabled me to start a production company in New York City. It's a low-budget film company to produce and direct movies.

...In the past, as now, [Hollywood] was a stamping ground for tastelessness, violence, and hyperbole, but once upon a time it turned out a product which sweetened the flavor of life all over the world.

The desire to move into a bigger house, to avoid living AIDS daily, and a dream to be accepted by a community and school, became possible and a reality with a movie about my life, The Ryan White Story.

Any adaptation - and I've done three in my career. I did 'Sweeney Todd' and 'Hugo' and 'Coriolanus.' It's important to find what makes it a movie as opposed to just a film presentation of a stage play.

To have a song work for the movie, it can't just be written apart and shoved in. It's got to come out of the action. It's got to talk about the characters, not the story: it has to augment that action.

Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs. So people pretend there is drama where there is none.

It gives us a look into a world that's very much like 'Traffic' was for drugs, this movie is for gun running. Dark at times, but I think Nic Cage is an incredible person to watch and very entertaining.

I spent two months in Fredericksburg, Texas, when I was 8, while my father shot a movie, and I loved it. I just embraced the whole cowboy culture. I got myself a pair of awesome boots and a cowboy hat.

I believe you make a movie three times: once in the development process - putting the ingredients like the script, cast and crew together - once in the shooting process, and once in the editing process.

I play Xbox. I have a little boy to look after. I have dogs. You know, I have things to do. I would love to be able to sit down and watch something like a movie. I watch my own movies because I have to.

The best sounds a kid will get is in a movie theater, with huge speakers, turned up loud. I always mix my music really loud. I don't care if you don't hear all the dialogue. The audience are not idiots.

I don't care if you call it AO for Adults Only, or Chopped Liver or Father Goose. Your movie will still have the stigma of being in a category that's going to be inhabited by the very worst of pictures.

My dad grew up in western Nebraska. I'd visit all the time as a kid, and it's very much like the Wild West. It felt to me like a cowboy movie. Stuff like that made me become this dreamer at a young age.

I'm very low-key. I don't really blend in, so it's difficult to go out in public. I like to do things that are kind of quiet, whether it's a dinner at my house or a restaurant, or a movie night at home.

The original release of 'Star Wars' was literally the first movie I remember seeing in a theater. Four years old was probably too young - I recall believing, for some time, that Darth Vader was a robot.

As great as Ed is, the wisdom out here is that he can't carry a movie. They'll pay him $3 million to be the second banana in Julia Roberts things. But they won't put up $3 million for an Ed Harris movie.

Building a house is like producing a movie. There's no right way to do it but a lot of wrong ways. You have to be flexible and creative. You have to move fast, be prepared - or it quickly becomes costly.

It was just crazy opportunity to see that whole world and the competitions that we had in the film, like Long Beach, it was just crazy and so much fun. I felt like I lived all those moments in the movie.

The movies I've made at a certain time of my life were exactly right for the stage of my life, the frame of mind I was in at the time. Each character I've had to play has been me in that time in my life.

In any movie, there are a number of scenes that get cut in an effort to keep the film from running too long. Some are of little consequence, but others are important scenes that are very painful to lose.

I loved the movies and I wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe. I thought she was so glamorous and everyone seemed to love her. I wanted to be like that and I told everyone I would be the next Marilyn Monroe.

Everything is always against you when making a movie, and if you don't have a solid blueprint that the entire team can get behind and understand and then execute, then you're going to be lost on the set.

In every movie, there's always some physical thing that triggers the character for me. In 'The Long Walk Home,' it was the girdle. Every time I'd put that girdle on, I'd feel my character wiggle to life.

'Breakfast at Tiffany's' isn't a great movie because Audrey Hepburn is brilliant and everyone else isn't. It's a great movie because everybody is fascinating, and she is at the center of it being amazing.

I wanted to write something from a child's viewpoint... Five of the characters I have played in movies have either been abused or became abusers, themselves, and I just kind of felt like there was a need.

A 'Torchwood' movie would be incredible. It would be sensational to have a beginning, a middle and an end in ninety minutes. A big walloping 'Torchwood' crunched into ninety minutes would be breathtaking.

I always used to wonder why American actors were getting fat, then I made a U.S. movie. I'm seeing all the food every day, and there's lots of waiting around because making an American movie is very slow.

You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

Sibi Malayali sir saw a picture of me in a Malayalam daily and felt I was suited for a role in his movie 'Ishtam.' My parents were opposed to it as they felt I was too young, but I persisted and prevailed.

I've got a role in the new Billy Bob Thornton movie that Billy Bob wrote and is going to direct called 'Jayne Mansfield's Car.' I only have four scenes, but I have as much dialogue as anybody in the movie.

You re-watch 'Napoleon Dynamite', and there's a lot of thrift shopping that goes on in that movie; there's a lot of funny stuff. It's definitely amusing, and paying 99 cents for a samurai sword is amazing.

When I was just starting out, I had two choices: I could be the beautiful girl on the main man's arm as decoration, or I would have to do a little independent movie to get any depth in the female character.

Working on the ABC movie 'Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy 'Satchel' Paige,'' which we filmed in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was a special pleasure, particularly because I'd played baseball in high school.

Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.

I cannot state enough how important post-production is for the success of a horror movie. You bring so much to it with the way you edit it, the way it is sound-designed, and the way the music works with it.

In the first Spider-Man, at the end of the movie, Peter Parker had to deny himself a relationship with a girl that he's in love with. The very next thing that happens is that he's swinging through the city.

Some of our favorite films are obviously not written by the person who directed it. And yet a 'Taxi Driver,' or some Nicholas Ray movie, like 'In a Lonely Place,' seems so personal or obsessive or whatever.

I think that directing is the ultimate martyred task of filmmaking, that it has nobility to it. It takes three years to make a film, for the most part. I think it requires the attentiveness of a mother hen.

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