Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've been fascinated by dreams my whole life, since I was a kid, and I think the relationship between movies and dreams is something that's always interested me.
I try not to have actors in mind when I write because the tendency then is to be influenced by either their last performance or your favourite of their performances.
A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended.
If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination. You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.
When you're dealing with the world of dreams, the psyche, and potential of a human mind, there has to be emotional stakes. You have to deal with issues of memory and desire.
I think there has been this increasing misperception that kids will not respond to something because it's also for adults. I think that often that tends to get underestimated.
It's difficult to keep anything fresh for an audience these days. With technology being what it is people seem to know everything there is to know about a film before you've even made it.
I've done really well so far in my career by trusting the audience to be as dissatisfied with convention as I am, as a film-goer. You want to go see a film that surprises you in some way.
The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.
I don't particularly enjoy watching films in 3D because I think that a well-shot and well-projected film has a very three-dimensional quality to it, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the technology.
The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.
I try to be as efficient as possible because in my process, I think that actually helps the work. I like having the pressure of time and money and really trying to stick to the parameters we've been given.
When you start really thinking about the potential of the human mind and its ability to create an entire world while you're sleeping, I come away feeling like our minds are not remotely understood by science.
I never meet anybody who actually likes the format, and it’s always a source of great concern to me when you’re charging a higher price for something that nobody seems to really say they have any great love for.
I realized that if you're trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it's mostly from my own process, my own experience.
When you play a videogame, you could be a completely different person than you are in the real world, certain aspects of the way your brain works can be leveraged for something you could never do in the real world.
I think for me, what I'm doing on set is I'm watching things happen as an audience member and trying to just look at, what's the image we're photographing, how will that advance the story and what will the next image be.
But 'Memento' was so successful, such a huge cult hit, almost on the scale of a large film. If that had happened, with all the acclaim, before the next job, I'd have found it very difficult to figure out what to do next.
I remember the initial genesis quite clearly. My interest in dreams comes from this notion of realizing that when you dream you create the world that you are perceiving, and I thought that feedback loop was pretty amazing.
I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.
Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn't really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously.
But I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.
We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't, in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.
As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.
Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
The atmosphere and the environment that you get on a Chris Nolan film that he and Emma [Tomson] create is one where you feel very safe and very confident and able to experiment with characters. It's a great place to be as an actor.
What I love about IMAX is with its extraordinary resolution and color reproduction it's a very rich image with incredible detail. It lends itself wonderfully to huge shots with much in the frame. Thousands of extras and all the rest.
It's always a fun collaboration with my brother. I'm very fortunate to be able to work with him. There's an honesty to collaboration. There's a lack of a gender or ego in our conversations. And so you can really throw anything around.
I think the films Insomnia and Memento share all sorts of thematic concerns, such as the relationship between motivation and action, and the difficulty of reconciling your view of the story with the supposed objective view of that story.
But, in each case, as a filmmaker who's been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.
My approach with actors is to try and give them whatever it is they need from me. Direction to me is about listening and responding and realizing how much they need to know from me and how much they have figured out for themselves, really.
You know when Hollywood does a great big blockbuster that really wraps you up in a world, and lets you believe in extraordinary things that move you in some way, in an almost operatic sensibility? That to me is the most fun I have at the movies.
Well, you always discover a lot in the editing room. Particularly the action, because you have to over-shoot a lot and shoot an enormous amount of material because many of the sequences have to be discovered in the editing and manipulation of it.
I sometimes think how strange it is that I've got to do exactly what I want, and that is difficult to cope with. You have to remind yourself every few weeks: I'm making this film and this is exactly what I want to do. And suddenly you're happy again.
I think for me when you look at the idea of being able to create a limitless world and use it almost as a playground for action and adventure and so forth, I naturally gravitate towards cinematic worlds, whether it's the Bond films and things like that.
But in the back of my mind I've always looked to the biggest-scale Hollywood movies. Because to me the most satisfying experience is of watching a movie, if it's done really well. And so that aspiration is always it for me, if I have the opportunity to do it.
Writing, for me, is a combination of objective and subjective approach. You take an objective approach at times to get you through things, and you take a subjective approach at other times, and that allows you to find an emotional experience for the audience.
There's very few directors I think in this industry that would pitch to a studio that they wanted to do a multi-layered almost at times existential high action, high drama surreal film that's sort of locked in his mind. And then have an opportunity to do that.
For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He's not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he's a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.
The structural notions to me always have to be worked out very carefully in the script stage. Whatever a particular structure is. Whether it's chronological or non-chronological. To me that's always about what point of view are we trying to address in the film?
In Hollywood there's a great openness, almost a voracious appetite for new people. In England there's a great suspicion of the new. In cultural terms, that can be a good thing, but when you're trying to break into the film industry, it's definitely a bad thing.
I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. 'Alien,' 'Blade Runner' just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.
I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. 'Alien', 'Blade Runner' just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.
I don't actually tend to do a lot of research when I'm writing. I do know because I think a lot of what I find you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do. If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway.
The film that really struck me was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. That was a film I watched many, many times and found endlessly fascinating in it's density. I think the density of that film is primarily visual density, atmospheric, sound density, moreso than narrative density.
My most enjoyable movie going experiences have always been going to a movie theater, sitting there and the lights go down and a film comes on the screen that you don't know everything about, and you don't know every plot turn and every character movement that's going to happen.
I have always been a big fan of the character and am more of a moviegoer than a comic book guy, there is always something about the character of Batman that is very elemental. There is a great powerful myth to the character and romantic element that draws from a lot of literary sources
For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. It's cheaper to work on film, it's far better looking, it's the technology that's been known and understood for a hundred years, and it's extremely reliable.
You never quite know what you're going to come back to and figure out how to make it work. You never quite know where that desire to finish something, or return to something in a fresh way, is going to come from. Every time I finished a film and went back and looked at it, I had changed as a person.
What I try to do is write from the inside out. I really try to jump into the world of the film and the characters, try to imagine myself in that world rather than imagining it as a film I'm watching onscreen. Sometimes, that means I'm discovering things the way the audience will, with character and story.