'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.
A lot of Hollywood films tend to be bloated, bombastic, loud. At the same time, I do like the infrastructure of making a blockbuster; it's like having a big train set.
'Troll 2' is one of the rare sequels where you don't have to waste time watching the first one, since the films have absolutely nothing to do with one another.
Every time you say yes to a film there's a certain percentage of your yes that has to do with the director, a certain percentage to do with the story, a certain percentage with the character, the location, etc.
I've been directing for 25 years almost, and I've only directed nine films in that time because I like to be careful.
Every time you make a film, you create a world. You make decisions about sets and costumes, and you create a universe connected to reality, but not reality itself.
I think Ingmar Bergman, Francoise Truffaut - all these people created images in my mind, beautiful pictures, I loved what was known at that time as the foreign film.
Ultimately, the film industry has always pushed out its biggies, and I don't have a problem with that. I just wish that we'd spend more time nurturing the smaller ones.
I get bored with the same old film coming out every weekend. It feels like it's the same story all the time, and the same visuals, and the characters' dilemmas are remarkably similar.
Working on a film, the setup for an action sequence takes a long time, and we need to shoot the scene many times to get different angles.
For a London play, rehearsal time would be four weeks for the entire show. In films, I'd spend six weeks on the big dance numbers to get them perfect before the actual shooting.
I think my dream would be to move into film, purely because there's a definite beginning, middle and end to a project. I struggle a bit with such a big series that's going all the time.
I wasted time writing films. I don't look back on those years as lost, but it wasn't what I should have been doing.
I've enjoyed the time I've had working on films. I've enjoyed television movie-of-the-week format. I've enjoyed the few comedies that I've done, and I've enjoyed one-hour television.
'To Kill a Mockingbird' represents Hollywood at its very finest, when a popular film could truly contain a message. It has one of the most moving scores of all time.
I smuggled the camera, it was no problem to smuggle the camera there. And I took 60 photos, two films, during the time when there was no one in the control room, in the building.
But I'd be lying if I didn't say that every time you go to make a film, you're desperate to either do it better than you did it last time or to not repeat yourself.
Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.
What was frustrating about Armageddon was the time I spent not doing anything. It was a big special effects film, and I wasn't crazy about pretending I was in outer space. It feels ridiculous.
Sometimes you go into a film and you have no time to prepare and have to compress the details into a few days and then rely on the instinct and what happens when you're in a scene with other actors and that chemistry or not.
I do tend to take time off. A year and a half ago I went to film school, and before that I had taken years off at a time to be involved politically or this or that.
