Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Film has become a very passive experience, but with theatre, there is a contract made with the audience, where they participate. That's why my parents' puppet theatre was such a special place - people used their imaginations. It's a muscle that needs using.
'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.
The more you practise happiness, the better you get at it. So if you spend lots of time practising being depressed, you're going to get really good at being depressed. And if you spend lots of time practising being happy, you're going to get better at being happy.
I went to comprehensive school in North London and left without any qualifications [diploma]. And I was doing bits of acting and improv in a drama club in the evenings. Then I discovered you didn't need qualifications to go to art school, you just needed a body of work.
Studios are often very nervous of things they don't recognize, by which I mean things that haven't been done before, and therefore, they take a really original idea, and they recognize the originality, and then they try and make it look like something they recognize. So they try to turn it into something far more procedural.
I don't ever want to go backwards, I quite like it. I like the freedom and I like the - What I set out to do was to make a big action-adventure movie that ticks all the boxes in terms of audience expectations and spectacle, and yet also make a very personal film and it feels like I've gotten away with that, I've managed that.
American actors are very different to British actors who have generally studied and been brought up culturally with the sense that the writer is the star and that their job is to serve the writing. Whereas Hollywood actors are brought up to believe that the actor is the star, and everything and everybody is in the service of them.
I've been wanting for some time to find a way of stylizing cinema and trying to get closer to the emotional story I was telling and get rid of all the bumph that goes with it and allow the audience a more participatory experience. It was an attempt to do all of those things and to express the idea that all these people were just performing roles in their lives.
So much of today's film culture, in England and America, is based on lies, really. The industry is very ambitious, and success has become such an opium, people start from the wrong place they forget sometimes that the core of what we do is storytelling. It serves a need, a purpose for the individual and society to pull us together in shared experience and help us realize we're not alone in that experience.