I didn't know any successful actors in Kenya, so I felt like I could get away with going to college to study film more easily than I could with saying, 'I want to be an actor.' That's what I did.
No matter how much I plan the overall arc of the character, you get there day one on the film and you shooting certain scenes first, and it goes completely different to anything you ever thought of, and then it's done.
With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it.
One of the differences between HBO and other television is that they demand the same coverage that you would have in a feature film. We need to have all the shots in order to make it as rich and as stunning as it looks. We can't cut any corners.
Now that I can edit the whole thing on AVID and edit the whole thing on tape, maybe I will do the next digitally, because maybe the quality will become less obvious between tape and film.
You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.
I don't want to make 'Chandni Bar 2.' I didn't think 'Fashion 2' will happen. If a film ends on a high note... makes the audience think and lingers in the end... that is needed.
I'm a huge cinemaphile. My interest in filmmaking came out of experimenting with different genres, and I wanted to go back to working in a way that was more personal, which, for me, was artwork. Commercials and films are more collaborative.
I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.
If I dream that I'm directing, it's not a film, it's like a commercial for cotton candy, and I've got four feet of cotton candy all around me that I've got to break through, like a brick wall or a fortress.
The thing with film is that it's so wide-reaching compared to comedy. When I release my comedy special, half a million people will see it. If I release a movie, five to ten million people will see it.
I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.
I think I'd like to play more happy roles because I haven't done too many of those. I think I'd like to do an action film; something with a harness would be fun.
I am often asked which of my films has come closest to my own ideal of performance, and I always answer, 'Educating Rita.'
Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on.
Boy, there's nothing more thrilling than a chase. I'd often thought, over the years, that someone should do a whole film where it's nothing but a chase.
Part of me always longed to do just one more film and see what Luke would be like now that he's on the level of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the student having become the master. But it was not meant to be.
When I go to a film, you're taking it easy and you let things wash over you. That's what cinema's all about. You get involved in a world that's being created in front of you.
I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.
[on his satisfaction as an artist] In terms of cinema and filmmaking, there are certainly the unexpected gifts that the actors bestow on you. Film is always a question of compromises with respect to what you originally intended.
'Detroit 1-8-7' - the numbers are police slang for murder - is filmed in that blue-collar Michigan city, providing a flavor of authenticity. Detroit offers a unique visual landscape that tells the story of the city and what it's been through.
