Filming is long - you get very tired, and your skin breaks out and you get lumps and bumps. It's easier if you're allowed to have bags under your eyes.
If I am to be remembered for anything I have done in this profession, I would like it to be for the four films in which I directed Spencer Tracy.
Prior to 'Tokyo Drift,' the iconic perception of Asians in Hollywood films has been either the Kung Fu guy, the Yakuza guy or some technical genius. It used to be such a joke, to be laughed at rather than with.
When a new generation watches the films, people might mention that it has improved their lovemaking. I guess it's because it isn't threatening. It was very sweet and delicate.
If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.
We did this two-week boot camp before we filmed the movie. I got to know everybody in the group and we became friends. We got really tight throughout those two weeks.
I didn't dream about being a director. I didn't know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morris College in Atlanta, Georgia.
A spine to my films that's become more evident to me is that many are about the choices people make, and the reverberations of those choices. You go this way, or that way, and either way, there's going to be consequences.
I deliberately, in a way, went for something that was a huge challenge and was a big period film. I was excited about the canvas on which I could tell the story as much as the story itself.
Film is important; it can be more than reportage or a novel - it creates images people have never seen before, never imagined they'd see, maybe because they needed someone else to imagine them.
It was really weird for me filming in New York, because I was born and raised there. I started acting and modeling when I was five or six, so I worked there.
Bad impulse buys make you feel grim, don't they? It's like having consumer Tourette's. I gravitate towards austere foreign-language film DVDs when insecure.
Also, if you watch the film once, there are lots of things that you won't get because there are punch lines in the first act, the setup to which isn't until the second act.
'On the Road' is another one of those, a film in which the audience has a very clear idea of who they think your character is, so you know you are asking for it. But that's the challenge.
Particularly in the final stages I always find that I'm rushed. It's dangerous when you're rushed in the editing stage, most of my early films are flawed in the cutting.
When I was a kid, which was just after Edison invented moving pictures, there were films that involved aliens coming to Earth for bad purposes.
It's interesting that people bring different things to oppressive and difficult situations, when they're reduced to the barest terms of survival. That's what provides tension in a lot of films.
I started with commercials - for shampoo, pancakes, insurance, Volvo. I did a Lux soap commercial with Sarah Jessica Parker. And I got a role in an indie film called 'Satellite' that did well in festivals.
A lot of the films I've made probably could have worked just as well 50 years ago, and that's just because I have a lot of old-fashion values.
I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.
I think the main thing I remembered throughout all of filming it was just that she just was extremely self-destructive. I think everybody can relate to that a little bit. She doesn't like herself.
