Ricky Fitts: I was filming this dead bird. Angela Hayes: Why? Ricky Fitts: Because it's beautiful.
With a film, you try to keep your vision in it. I think with 'The American' and 'Control' I managed to do that.
I am constantly swimming on the margin, neither 100% American, French, nor Lebanese. I am none of those. I am the result of those three. Sometimes it's an asset: no one can put you in a category. That I do not make typical Lebanese, European or Ameri...
The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.
Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys.
Right before 'American Dreams,' I started to pursue these avenues, like short films and getting into a couple night courses to really study photography and cinematography, and the language of visual storytelling.
In 2003, I almost died of an intestinal blockage when I was on a mountain in Chile, filming a segment for 'Scientific American Frontiers.'
Also, there are now new laws in Brazil which create incentives for Argentine and Latin American films to be premiered and distributed in Brazil and vice versa.
None of the films I've done was designed for a mass audience, except for 'Indiana Jones.' Nobody in their right mind thought 'American Graffiti' or 'Star Wars' would work.
Amélie: [whispering in cinema] I like to look for things no one else catches. [film on the cinema screen: as a man and a woman are about to kiss, a fly walks across a windowpane in the background] Amélie: I hate the way drivers never look at the ro...
American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.
There's something about an American soldier you can't explain. They're so grateful for anything, even a film actress coming to see them.
I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley.
I've just done a film in the United States. It's a thriller called 'A Crime', with Harvey Keitel, we play against each other, and it's so great to play in another language. But I'm definitely not American.
Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I've seen, what I know - they're not all screaming faceless mullahs. It's disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named.
I never really worked in Hollywood. Some American producers came to Europe to shoot films with me, so it's a different situation... It was not my aim.
I have done film, television and theatre - all at a pretty substantial level - I don't think it's possible for American actors to do that.
I would love to say to all Americans: 'Each candidate is going to produce a film of an hour and a half. You're going to watch one from each candidate, and then you're going to vote!'
I wouldn't mind being in an American film for a laugh, but I certainly don't want to be in Thingy Blah Blah 3, if you know what I mean.
So I am getting a little bored with defining one type of film as American and the other European or from somewhere else because the division is no longer true.
In the late 1980s the amount of German films was down to four or five percent of the market, and the remaining 95 percent were American. It is now 20 to 30 percent German productions.
