I was always raised on cowboy films, and then when I could start making choices about the movies I wanted to watch I found myself wanting to watch gangster films which were slightly more sophisticated than the baseline stuff that was in westerns.
Broadway Lady: [sees Riggan on the roof] Hey, is this for real, or are you shooting a film? Riggan: A film! Broadway Lady: You people are full of shit!
Anything that's memorable about a movie is often what a test audience will object to because they're being asked to be experts. They just compare the film they finished watching to all of the other films that they've seen.
I can think of films that I'm producing right now that are extremely hard-hitting, graphic films, that nobody necessarily wants to see, graphic in terms of violence, of adult content and racial and historical subject matter.
I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.
Well, it wasn't a holiday, but I had expected to do some sightseeing when I went to Haiti to film a series called 'True Horror' for Discovery. Before I arrived, our film crew were kidnapped and held at knifepoint.
When you're making under-million-dollar films, it becomes so much about actors' availability. When you're using big actors for small films, you're in second or third position to the big monoliths.
With Fever, the film was so made for the screen, and there's so much surround sound that was done for the film - enormous detail paid to that. I wasn't thinking video, because I didn't know how it was going to turn out.
Filming a movie is different from a TV show because film is a lot quicker, you get to see the character progress and grow all in one script, and in television, you wait for a weekly update on each character.
She is also brought to a point of zero in the beginning of the story, and I think you can say that about a lot of my films in that they are often about people who are brought to the point of zero in the beginning of the film.
Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined.
I think film requires a lot more patience and concentration and each day you're keeping the entire picture in your head throughout a two to three month film shoot. Whereas TV, especially half hour, is like doing a play a week or live theater.
If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
I've made a number of independent films that didn't receive theatrical distribution, that a lot of people haven't heard of, and as a result, I've conditioned myself to go into small independent films with the expectation that they will not, and there...
Neither Rainer Werner, nor any of us could have succeeded, or produced the number of films that we did, just on our own. We showed our films to each other, discussed them vigorously and rarely agreed.
I kind of worry about that a little bit - we lost our film culture for 30 years because the Americans came in and bought up all the cinema chains and wouldn't show any Australian films.
I've often thought that my background in rock 'n' roll has gone to waste in film work. My background was that I was a rock 'n' roll drummer and I don't think I used drums in my first ten years of film scoring.
The Australian film industry is a small industry, so you have to really be flexible within working in different mediums. A lot of actors work in theater, film, and television, because there's not much opportunity in terms of employment there. So you ...
I was slightly disheartened when three of my films didn't work at the box-office. But the silver lining is that people did appreciate my work in those films. Had my performance gone unnoticed, I would've been in big trouble then.
All the jobs I've gotten in the last two years are because directors have seen the work I've done - indie films, plays, short student films, TV - since I moved to the states in 1996. I mean, I have an entire career in Canada that nobody has seen.
Stanley Kubrick, I had been told, hates interviews. It's hard to know what to expect of the man if you've only seen his films. One senses in those films painstaking craftsmanship, a furious intellect at work, a single-minded devotion.
