It's funny how it usually works out that I end up dying. It sort of works out, because by the time I die, I'm usually tired of working on that particular movie, so I look forward to it.
As you know it is a comedy so everything is a little bit pushed. That's what's funny about this kind of movie is you can laugh about the absurdity, and the bad side of life.
Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie 'Contact,' which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a ...
There's so much craziness that comes along with being a movie star that you can get so confused. Unless you've spent your whole life waiting to be the centre of attention, it's pretty terrifying.
I've had some painful experiences in my life, but I feel like I'm trivializing them by using them for a scene in a movie. I don't want to do that. It just makes me feel kind of dirty for having done that.
When you do one movie at a time, if one goes crazy and becomes successful, your life changes. But you can step back and catch your breath.
I began with small roles in successful movies like 'No Country For Old Men' by the Coen brothers; but it was 'The Last Exorcism' that changed my life: with what I earned, I left Texas and moved to Los Angeles.
'Bagdad Cafe' was a film that changed many, many people's lives... how they saw themselves and how they looked at their life situation. I thought I made a little movie. All the mail that I get is about how it changed lives, and that's wonderful.
So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies; they're lived through what we watch on television - they're not actual events in our life.
The movies I've made at a certain time of my life were exactly right for the stage of my life, the frame of mind I was in at the time. Each character I've had to play has been me in that time in my life.
I just don't want to make the same old movies. I'm not interested in it. Directing's hard. It takes up a lot of your life, and I'm not that interested in making the same old film.
I think action movies bring more excitement than tears, but I always want to take it to another level. I mean, I think if one appreciates anything in life to a certain degree, it could possibly bring tears to your eyes.
I can't comment on any outside perception. I'm happy to come out and talk about movies that I've worked on in a setting like this. Otherwise, I have my own life that I live which is very different and private.
The movies that I love and model after, like 'Annie Hall,' 'When Harry Met Sally,' and in particular for me, 'Broadcast News,' are the tone of life, which isn't a setup punch-line every two minutes.
'Hairspray' was a movie turned Broadway musical turned Hollywood remake, and that is the 'Lion King' circle of life as we know it in Times Square, the creative loop that swings for the stars and sometimes crashes into the upper deck.
I've been to two festivals in my life, and I've never been to Toronto. I haven't really been making festival movies. This is new territory for me.
I'm proud of all the movies I've made. They're not sequels, they're not franchises. And the reason I pick my films carefully is that I don't want to spit on my life. I like to think of myself as more than that.
I believe in my privacy. I always have, and I always will. I don't think that my private life needs to be on display for me to get a better response at the box office or for me to get a better choice of movies.
It took me so long to get to the music, where that was what I wanted to do all my life. It took me so long to realise that it wasn't really movies that I wanted to do, but to be on stage singing.
I think of a book and a play, or a book and a movie, as two separate things - I don't think of it as my novel having a new life.
Usually you talk about directors in terms of the way they choose camera lenses or a kind of light to create a certain effect. But to me the most valuable commodity for a movie to create is a feeling of life, and that's what A Hard Day's Night has in ...
