Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
And then we watched an amazing number of movies from the late '60s and '70s, which is my favorite time, and we studied their camera movements, their stocks, the way they lit stuff, the colors they used.
Millions of filmmakers would love to be in my position right now. If you are honest it makes the world a better place. I created the room with my passion and after all these years it finally worked out.
To me, the big difference is when you yell cut and then you have to walk over there and deliver a note, it gives it much more import as opposed to "Hey, try that." It's just much more intimate, I think.
In the case of a film like The Exorcist or To Live and Die in L.A., I saw the whole movie in my head before I went to shoot it. I never did storyboards, or anything like that. I had the film in my head.
I remember in grade school having a group of friends and enjoying that sense of community, enjoying living in an imaginary world that wasn't just by yourself or your sibling but a whole group of people.
I really think that I don't mind people sleeping during my films, because I know that some very good films might prepare you for sleeping or falling asleep or snoozing. It's not to be taken badly at all.
I thought that choosing a non-professional was a condition for me, because it would allow Juliette to have a less-professional way of acting. It would challenge her performance as a professional actress.
I feel like a tree. A tree doesn't feel a duty to start doing something about the earth from which it comes. A tree just has to bear fruit, and leaves and blossoms. It doesn't feel grateful to the earth.
[Henry] James is much more complex than Jane Austen. That's why it's not so easy to adapt him. People expect a nice period piece, but that's not always the case. There's a deep human mystery in his work.
It's obviously a lot more of a political undertaking making a movie in Hollywood and it's a business there. In Australia, they don't expect films to make money; whereas in America they're counting on it.
I think one of the most important American films is 'Jackie Brown,' which is such a humble depiction of humble characters but so powerful. The film was pure depiction of the American poverty of the '90s.
Godard is incredibly brilliant, the things he says. Apparently here in France, the most interesting thing when a new film of his is going to come out are his press conferences, because he's so brilliant.
The jail thing is very, very present in all of my work... Sometimes not very frontally. The jail is coming from the camps, because my mother was in the camps, and she internalized that and gave it to me.
A debut movie is something that you envision for many, many years. If you really want to make a movie, you constantly think about this first movie, so when you make it, you want to have everything in it.
To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.
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.
Actors are like magicians. They'll sit there and do all their tricks to each other. It's very competitive, and the goal is to get them bonding, to get them to know the real person as quickly as possible.
We're all like detectives. We want to figure things out. Life, you know, we want to figure out life, and we want to figure out what's going on, so it's beautiful. It's beautiful that people are thinking.
Anger, stress, tension, depression, sorrow, hate, fear - these things start to retreat. And for a filmmaker, having this negativity lift away is money in the bank. When you're suffering you can't create.
The Fighter was about a family struggling to overcome and fighting each other sometimes, and I went back and rewrote this script which I had written for my son initially because my son has mood disorder.
There's a lot of journalism about poverty, but sometimes it just helps to see that there's a real person who becomes a real mom, who is working with unsustainable wages that could eventually destroy her.
In terms of Ray Liotta, when I was a teenager growing up in Colorado, I didn't have pictures of girls on my wall. I had pictures of Ray Liotta on my wall. Along with Mike Patton, he was one of my heroes.
When I was a young man in school, I used to read science fiction and really liked it. And as I became a young artist, I was filling up my portfolio with alien planets and spacecraft and things like that.
By the time I got to Bournemouth Art College, I'd been so inspired by Sam Raimi and Robert Rodriguez and their tiny, no-budget films that I decided to do a feature-length version of 'Fistful Of Fingers.'
And yet because of my attempt at sincerity I have been condemned, hooted at, reviled; filthy rumors have been circulated about me, not about my characterizations but about me personally, my private self.
Music was something I had put aside to make movies. Somehow I earlier felt there was only so much creative energy allotted to your life and only that much time to pursue your creativity. But I was wrong.
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.
The 'Dead' films allow me to talk about things that a drama, say, won't. 'Dawn Of The Dead,' which was set in a shopping mall, is on one level about consumerism; 'Land Of The Dead' is a response to Bush.
I've had much more down in my life than I've had up. And much more struggle. First of all, when I went into the film school everybody said, "What are you doing? This is a complete dead-end for a career."
I enjoy fashion photography and textiles, that whole aspect of it. As more of an art form, I like Proenza Schouler. Those guys are really cool because they seem to have an interesting approach to it all.
I don't try to define the cosmos, I know it's unknowable, but I can understand my place in the world and my place in the universe through a mixture of Taoism, Catholicism, Zen or whatever I have at hand.
If you tell me I can't do something, that's the worst thing to tell me. And that's what I tell girls, and what Beckham's about: you can do it, you can do it better, and you can do it in the way you want.
Apparently there’s this kind of songbird that thinks it dies every time the sun goes down. In the morning, when it wakes up, it’s totally shocked to still be alive—so it sings this really beautiful song.
One of the things that is devastating is I realise I haven't been living a different life than when I was, like, 12. I'm shocked at how reclusive I've been since then. I was unaware of it until recently.
Anamorphic is very difficult because the distance from the lens to the person to focus is very long so you need a lot of distance from the camera to the person so that means that you need a lot of space.
One of the series of decisions that the great screenwriter John McNamara made was about who to depict. [Ronald] Reagan had a role in HUAC, he was a friendly witness, but never went over-the-top about it.
When I signed up for Google Plus, it recommended 500 people for me to invite. You know, and once I invited those 500 people I got another 500 people. So it has a huge install base that it can start from.
I like marginal characters, I like real people. I learn more from talking to my plumber when he comes to fix my toilet than I do from meeting a movie star. I think my movies are in the same vein as that.
There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience.
I stopped directing in 2001 for - oh, damn - four or five years, until I did the TV series 'Masters Of Horror.' I had been working steadily as a director since 1970. That's a long time. I was burned out.
I think it's human nature that if we don't have our own family, we will create a family, because it's human nature, and it's that element of trust and dependency and love and all of those sort of things.
Anytime something makes money, no matter how outré, it's instantly mainstream. A good example is rock 'n' roll. When rock 'n' roll was first played to a wide audience it was considered the devil's music.
I'm trying to do of a certain attitude in life. I'm against separatism. I'm for everyone to gather. I'm for everyone lunatic to hang out together. I want to hear somebody else's bad night, not just mine.
I'd be arrested if I still smoked because I'm the one who would be changing the battery in the airplane in the lavatory to take out the smoke detector. I would've been those people they warn you against.
Putting out compilation records, buying the right to music is incredibly complicated. You have to find the writer of the song and the publisher of the song - not the singer - and make two separate deals.
How do you make RoboCop? How do you slowly bring a guy to be a robot? How do you actually take humanity out of someone and how do you program a brain, so to speak, and how does that affect an individual?
I like youth, and I like stories about feeling things intensely and about transitional moments in human life. I reflect on my life and that's just a moment when I felt things probably the most intensely.
The good thing about helping an actor create a performance is, you really don't know how you're going to do it. It's a challenge every time you get to the set. That keeps the energy flowing all the time.
From the time you open the newspapers to the time the lights go off at night, it's all lies. We lie the most to the people closest to us. For fear of hurting them, breaking their heart, or worrying them.
I think a lot of times, when you're working in this business, and you're both actors or somehow involved in the industry, you can get torn in different directions and be on completely opposite schedules.