Motion picture making is a very, very involved affair. It is completely my baby. I'm a thorough professional. I plan films right from the conception of an idea to its final execution.
Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.
You're seeing me develop, not only as a filmmaker if you've seen my earlier films, but you're seeing me kind of learn how to be a human, how my philosophy has evolved.
No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies.
I don't think of myself as a TV actor. I think of myself as a film, television and Off-Off-Off-Off Broadway actor.
I was about 26 or 27 and it was imperative that I make a living right away and it's hard to make a living on stage, so I started in television and film.
So there was always a stunt coordinator on those films that was from Stunts Unlimited and I was just one of the young warriors from Stunts Unlimited that got to be a part of it because it was a big show and they needed a lot of guys.
Independent films in this country are in the same position. Miramax and Fine Line are not independent - they're with Disney! Come on. Or they're with Warner Brothers. They're all with somebody.
We started filming in 1993 which was only four years after the fall of communism. The difference in Budapest over the last five years has been remarkable.
There were some things that I found I really enjoyed singing about; like, on the title track, there's this film-noir character of a woman who's sort of losing it in a room.
I consider myself a 'local' actor in France. I started out in France, I went to drama school in France and the French film community was very welcoming to me when I was a young actress.
Digital video is so beautiful. It's lightweight, modern, and it's only getting better. It's put film into the La Brea Tar Pits.
I think that directing is the ultimate martyred task of filmmaking, that it has nobility to it. It takes three years to make a film, for the most part. I think it requires the attentiveness of a mother hen.
Ultimately, it has been a struggle- but I was in Minneapolis and Austin a couple of weeks ago, sitting in theaters with complete strangers watching this weird movie that Kirk and I thought up and I was excited to be making film.
I started my career wanting to make a 'James Bond' movie, and I couldn't get hired! I made 'The Bourne Identity,' and ultimately the impact of that film was that it changed the 'James Bond' franchise.
So I just came out here to Los Angeles with a bunch of buddies I had gone to film school with. You know, for better or worse, we just tried to slug it out here.
You get to the middle of a take that's going really well and the camera will run out of film. They have to stop you, apologize and then you've got to get things going all over again.
I discovered that silent film is almost an advantage. You just have to think of the feeling for it to show. No lines pollute it. It doesn't take much - a gaze, an eyelash flutter - for the emotion to be vivid.
We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn't have a sort of influence. It does.
I've got four piercings in my left, so we've dubbed my right one the 'period drama ear.' I have to be filmed from that side when I do emotional close-ups in 'Downton.'
I had travelled pretty widely around the world even before then, so I knew where to go to film wildlife.
