Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
'Boy' was about my dad.
I daydream all the time.
I love living in New Zealand.
Sometimes there are really happy mistakes.
There are 100,000 versions of Jeff Goldblum.
As kids, we all thought Bob Marley was Maori.
Hitler rounded up all of the vampires in Europe.
It was never really my plan to become a filmmaker.
Music - it's motivational and just makes you relax.
My main thing was painting; I was just going to do that.
I play music all the time because silence freaks me out.
In my films, a lot of the situations come from real life.
I'm not interested in doing work that doesn't captivate me.
There were definitely Nazis who saw the error of their ways.
My world is not spectacle and explosion. It's two people talking.
One of my favourite books when I was young was 'Wuthering Heights.'
I've always found the script to be more of a skeleton, the template.
I think our first heroes with whom we discover flaws are our parents.
To make filmmaking interesting to me, I want to keep learning things.
I find that a lot of child actors are ruined once they've done a job.
I'm always fascinated by the theme of children who parent the adults.
Most people in their lives do feel like they are outsiders at some point.
When I became a film-maker, all my favourite films, they weren't comedies.
Nothing could be more restrictive than working with people in advertising.
A set should be like a family, except that you all actually like each other.
The films I like to watch are when they make it relatable to human audiences.
Coming from a very small country, it's always nice to see our own doing well.
'Eagle vs Shark' is a little film I could take risks with and make mistakes on.
I don't mind going from sadness to comedy in a split-second or mixing the two up.
I was depressed about the roles that were on offer, so I had to make my own stories.
I'm in all my films, I can't help it. I just jam myself in there if there's a space.
I always wanted to play a dapper gentleman, and I also always wanted to play my mum.
I love films that make you feel something but also deliver that payload behind jokes.
I like to find comedy or something interesting to look at with whatever I'm working on.
You can have integrity with your art, but worrying about integrity doesn't pay the bills.
A feature film is an expansion of budget, stress, story, hours, time, workload, everything.
In a lot of my films, the biggest theme is family, making families out of those around you.
When I play characters, I like playing people who just comment on stuff, stand around and talk.
Kids are always very savvy. It doesn't take long for a kid to realize when an adult is a loser.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough interesting acting roles in New Zealand to sustain a career.
I'm used to working with restrictions and that's when you come up with the more creative stuff.
The stuff I'm passionate about is what I write; it isn't multi-million-dollar franchise movies.
I think everyone has experienced those boring arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes.
I love heroes that really go through ordeals and then come out the other end completely changed.
I hate the modern day the kids live in. I don't think it's very cool. Everyone's interconnected.
I love heroes that really go through ordeals, and they come out the other end completely changed.
You make up a character, there's always gonna be parts of you that, like it or not, shine through.
That's what attracts me to the kind of characters I try and write - that they're not cut and dried.
I want to do weird things and big budget things and no budget things. I don't have a five-year plan.
I've loved comics since I was a kid, collected them, I've always dreamed of being involved in comics.