I had this spooky psychological thing about 'The Piano' before it began, which was how everybody was going to go nuts on the set. Because a film tends to set up the way people are going to behave.
I think feature film can be quite conservative, because you have to now get audiences to come out, and it's quite a hard thing to do. Of course, television can be conservative too.
That's what film can do in a way that TV and other long-form storytelling can't. It gives you this very immersive moment.
A woman in Mexico wanted me to heal her. But I can't heal anybody. I just put my hand on her and said, 'Thank you for seeing the film.'
After a couple of attempts at making shorts, I decided to make a feature film with a friend, Tom Hall, whom I've worked with ever since.
People have said that my films are very difficult to watch, that they're experiences you are put through rather than ones you enjoy, and it's true.
Everybody doesn't get to do each and every film. I don't compete with others; I compete with myself. I have been an athlete, a sportsperson; so I know how to be competitive in a healthy way.
I don't really know how many films I've done, and I don't look at this as a race that I necessarily want to win. Nor is it a race that I want to stop running.
Arts and crafts, or getting to be in a play with people, or making a little short film, that's pure sugar, because the stakes are so low.
I think the film is beautifully realised. His legacy as a journalist was recorded - as it were - well, and certainly the important issues of the '50s - or even today - are delivered and presented to the audience in a rather honest and objective way.
When I was 16, I made some little 35mm documentaries about the poor in London. I went round Notting Hill, which was a real slum in the 1950s, shooting film.
That's the thing about film acting and television acting. You just release yourself and do what is true for the moment, and ignore everybody and everything and all the technical razzmatazz that goes on.
Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.
You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.
I'd only read a bit of the first book. And I just knew about all the media furor over it. But I'd not read books 2 or 3. I'd just read a bit of it. And I'd seen the films.
I was 15 years old at university, studying economics and philosophy, and I saw a retrospective of Australian film. They were very raw. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' 'Gallipoli;' they were fantastic.
With the Internet, kids today learn things quicker than we do and they have everything there is to see, so you have to do more than just remake some old '70s film.
If you're playing a cop in a modern film, you don't have to walk with your spine straight up and bow before a fight. There's a lot of free form of expressing yourself as an actor.
I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I've seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.
I run upright mostly when I see daylight, so if you watch film you'll see I don't get hit in the chest much.
Where people are now in terms of the economic crisis, they're looking at what we think is the bottom, and I think that's when people look to film and to spirituality.
