Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My god is narrative filmmaking.
I'm not a comic book guy at all.
'Angel Heart' was one of my favorite films.
I was a TV junkie as a kid. I am the Sesame Street generation.
When I go to movies I generally want to be taken to another world.
I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking
I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.
Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.
I've spent a life loving women and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.
Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.
I think people are people and if their feelings are real and truthful, they can connect.
Casting ethnic characters is a very hard thing to do, but it's important. It's also interesting.
But steady-cams are very different than hand-helds, because hand-held gives you that verite feel.
I couldn't sleep one night and I was sitting in my office and I realized that I was an independent filmmaker.
I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.
Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.
As filmmakers, we can show where a person's mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it.
At the end of Requiem all I wanted to do was get a DV camera and just do a small film. But then the hunger comes back.
I only want to work with actors that really get it and make it work. I didn't want it to be a star-driven thing anymore.
I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life.
To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.
Now there is so much expertise and brainpower it's hard to be at the cutting edge of what's cool and not do something that's totally geeky.
I hope that Requiem is better than Pi. I hope that Pi is better than my student films, and I'm hoping that I'm getting better as I get older.
I think it's important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you've got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances.
For too long we have been taking, and the Earth has been giving. But that free-for-all, that all-you-can-eat buffet, it's over. The salad bar is closed.
I've always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There's hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn't hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.
I spent about a year and a half doing technical post work on 'The Fountain'. Although I do like the process, I think my favorite part of filmmaking is the actors.
I think it's my nature to try and make original content, and that's what I've done, is just try and approach things in an original way, and do things differently.
Turning 30 was when my parents both got cancer and were fighting it and beat it, but their mortality started to get to me. Everything wasn't as hunky-dory like it was.
In the story, which is only a few chapters long in Genesis, Noah never even speaks until after the flood - but when you have Russell Crowe, you're going to make him speak.
I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.
I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.
If you ask any person on this crew what they think of Hugh Jackman they'll admit they've never seen anything like it. I'll give him an emotional note and he'll hit it every time.
I have a team, the same team of filmmakers I worked with on 'Pi' and 'Requiem'. Which is my cameraman, and my composer, and my producer. We've all worked together for a number of films.
Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.
I had some big ups and downs when I was in my 20s and the one thing I learned was, no matter how low it gets, something good will come along - something always comes out of that dark period.
People have been screaming about the end of times forever, it's always the end of times. But there's just so much evidence that the world is changing so radically right now. How much can the world take?
Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in
Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in.
I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life. I've spent a life loving women, and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.
I don't think I make genre films. I think studios try to sell films as genres because they know how to do that. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know what I make. It's sort of a pot roast, all my films.
You can't look at the Noah story and not see some kind of environmental connection. The Creator wants to start over. He wants creation to be given a shot at survival, and the true enemy is the wickedness of men.
I think people are people and, if their feelings are truthful, they can connect. It doesn't matter if you're an aging, 50-something wrestler at the end of his career, or an ambitious, 20-something ballet dancer.
I think video games and that stuff should be as violent as possible, but age-appropriate. It should be realistic. When it's not realistic you run into kids running around shooting people and not realizing the consequences.
I think religion is often very different from spirituality. Religion is often about rules and people trying to control our lives who are actually very unspiritual... God can be found anywhere, and in fact, everywhere. And you don
These wrestlers aren't organized. They have no union, no pension and no insurance. You meet wrestler after wrestler who sold out Madison Square Garden ten years ago, basically running on fumes today. There's a lot of drama there.
I don't make films that are easy to market, unfortunately. I think that 'Pi' was the easiest one, because we had that symbol to stick up everywhere, so that was a good gimmick, and created a good mystery, and we didn't have to do huge scale.
I think that there's an infinite amount of places where you can stick a camera. There's an infinite amount of choices of what could be going on. There's an infinite amount of places for so many things, so you have to figure out how to do your job.
I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you're following your passion.
Film is a great tool to play with time, going back and forth through time, or speeding time up and slowing it down and do stuff like that. That's something you can't experience in real life that you can experience on film, and it takes you to a different place.