Yes. Otherwise I could have done a lot of Hollywood movies. After Crouching Tiger I got a lot of offers, but I turned them down because they were all victim roles - poor girls sold to America to be a wife or whatever. I know I have the ability to go ...
Charlie Kaufman: There are no rules, Donald. And anyone who says there are is just, you know... Donald Kaufman: Not rules, principles. McKee writes that a rule says you *must* do it this way. A principle says, this *works* and has through all remembe...
Donald Kaufman: Charles, you'll be glad. I have a plan to get me out of your house, pronto. Charlie Kaufman: A job is a plan. Is your plan a job? Donald Kaufman: Drum roll, please. I'm gonna be a screenwriter. Like you.
Charlie Allnut: I don't know why the Germans would want this God-forsaken place. Rose Sayer: God has not forsaken this place, Mr. Allnut, as my brother's presence here bears witness.
[Taggart spots Bart and Charlie on a hand-cart sinking into quicksand] Taggart: Oh, shit. Quicksand! [Lassos the hand-cart and drags it but not the men out of the quicksand] Taggart: Dang, that was lucky. Doggone near lost a four hundred dollar handc...
I think Amsterdam is to Holland what New York is to America in a sense. It's a metropolis, so it's representative of Holland, but only a part of it - you know, it's more extreme, there's more happening, it's more liberal and more daring than the coun...
I wanted to do a film for a while, but I never found a script that I felt I was going to be the right person for; because if you've never made a film, you're not taught how to make a film, and you feel like you lack skills.
I had no agent, and I was getting approached by so many people that I tried to escape for a while because I couldn't believe that world. Photography is not an industry, and suddenly an industry came to me, so I sort of had to accept it in the end and...
After my grandmother passed away, I felt the urge to take my camera to her flat. I knew this flat from my childhood in Tel Aviv. Going to this flat was like going abroad; there was a real feeling of traveling across Tel Aviv and ending up in Berlin.
If you are prepared to make a fool of yourself for them then you usually get that back. I think that there are points where you become so close to an actor, you know them so well, almost as well or better than their spouse. You have to know them, war...
I was watching Monster's Ball, which is a fabulous movie. It's just a little gem: beautifully shot, and shot in a way I never would have done. It made me feel very old, really, because it wasn't eccentric for its own sake, it was just very original.
Some of these actresses or public personas who are very public about their disciplined diets, more power to them. I just don't see the point. I'm just not going to be one of those people photographed in a bikini where people are like, 'OMG, look at A...
I'm not sure why, but I seem to be drawn to stories about abuses of power. But I'm also drawn, not so much to victims' stories, as stories that tend to show how power works. Because if you don't understand the criminals, you can't figure out how to s...
One of the things that concerns me is the lack of adult supervision, and more specifically, caring adult supervision, at various reform schools and juvenile detention centers. I think there's a kind of Darwinian brutality that can run rampant when ki...
I became a clown when these docs came to the house in Berkeley and asked me to come cheer up kids. I'd just had my third spinal fusion and I was looking for something to take my mind off the pain I was in.
You can always make a film somehow. You can beg, borrow, steal the equipment, use credit cards, use your friends' goodwill, wheedle your way into this or that situation. The real problem is, how do you get people to see it once it is made?
'The Conversation' was the first film I edited on a flatbed machine - a KEM editing machine. I've been using Final Cut or the AVID for 12 years now, so I was interested in looking at this film and seeing if I could tell if it had been edited the old ...
There's a big link between trains and film. One of the first filmed objects was a train. The clickety-clack of the projector and the clickety-clack of the train are similar. There is the idea of the voyage - every voyage is a story. I wonder if film ...
I wrote and finished the script for 'Man in the Middle' two weeks after the September 11 bombing. It's a very American film about an ex-diplomat based in the Middle East, a leader in the U.S. administration who now sells used cars in the Middle East.
Dick Goodwin: [Dick Goodwin questions Dan Enright about evidence of Twenty One being fixed] Dan, I have it on the kinescope, it's clear as day. The man literally did a double-take. Enright: [laughing] He did a double-take? And who told you this? Is t...
Uncle Charlie: You think you know something, don't you? You think you're the clever little girl who knows something. There's so much you don't know, so much. What do you know, really? You're just an ordinary little girl, living in an ordinary little ...
