'She's Gotta Have It' and 'School Daze,' I really didn't know what I was doing. And the biggest indicator of that was the acting. 'Do the Right Thing' was like the first film where I really felt comfortable working with actors.
Film and theater are about misdirection and making the audience see something. I find it interesting. One of the things we do in 'True Blood' is shoot all of our stunts in camera. Instead of doing some kind of visual effect, we try to make it happen.
I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.
I wanted to play a mother again. I thought it would be interesting to play the mother of an older child. And it was also the kind of part I've been looking for my whole career, actually, in film. You know, just to play a femme fatale who's very smart...
I remember my first scene with Alan Rickman, and I was anxious because he is a slight 'method' actor; as soon as he is in his cloak, he walks and talks like Snape - it is quite terrifying. But I really wanted to talk to him because 'Robin Hood' was o...
Kids are always infatuated with the action in martial arts films. Let me tell you, there is nothing better for kids than the arts. That is what kept me straight and decent. I always had a place to go. That was the dojo. I always had something to look...
Sometimes I get mad when I think that I only have maybe 40 or 50 more springs in New York. When I miss one, 'cause I'm on location for a film, I wanna go, 'That's it, that just cost me one of my 50!'
If I knew how to operate a DVR, you'd find episodes of 'The Tavis Smiley Show,' 'Democracy Now!' and lots of stuff from TV Land. What you can find now on my Hulu account are Korean soap operas, 'Grey's Anatomy' and films from the Criterion collection...
So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing.
And people are always saying: 'Well, you go to Hollywood and you get yourself a film career or a TV series, and then you can do anything you want. Because then you've got the clout.' That had always sounded like a lot of hooey to me, but now I think ...
I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.
My all-time favorite is Brad Pitt in 'Interview with the Vampire.' He's so sexy. I'm a fan of anything he does, but in that film he's a vampire who doesn't want to feed. There's something super sexy about someone who has to feed to survive but doesn'...
I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.
It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the ...
I believe if you go to a movie theatre, and you see something you think is incredible, if you walk out of the theatre and there was a bin in the lobby of DVDs of the film you just watched, you would buy four of them - one for you and three for your f...
The fact is that HBO is doing the kind of films and the kind of stories that the movie industry used to do. You look at a lot of the specialty sections of studios that have gone under... and there's no doubt in my mind why filmmakers and screenwriter...
When I started, with films like 'The Bay Boy' and 'Stand by Me', I look back on those interviews and I'm amazed; there's no mention of my father; it's not even 'son of Donald Sutherland.' I caught a bit of a break in that it never felt like a weight ...
Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from 'point a' to 'point b,' just so that you can end up at 'point c.' They are just sort of stick characters. That's just not interesting to me.
What's frustrating to me is when, on a low-budget movie, people don't take chances. A big-budget movie, that script's your bible; nobody's going to risk going off the page. But when you're doing a very low-budget film, why not take some chances, inte...
People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?" [Interview in , 15 October 2005]
The acting bug just seemed to stick with me. I loved going to theatre school in college and continued to train in film classes and had been auditioning for T.V. and movie roles since I was in my late teens. My career has been slow and steady, and I k...
