But you talk to most filmmakers and it is six, seven, eight years trying to get things off the ground. It is incredible really.
With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.
Especially when you talk about the power of documentary filmmaking, you can't really have a slant; financially, you can't have a slant on the end goals.
I think the worst that can happen in filmmaking is if you're working with a storyboard. That kills all intuition, all fantasy, all creativity.
I call myself a feminist, not a feminist filmmaker. If somebody asked me if I had a feminist sensibility it would be pretty hard to deny, but is it the theme of my work? Not necessarily. I'm interested in a lot of things.
I spent about a year and a half doing technical post work on 'The Fountain'. Although I do like the process, I think my favorite part of filmmaking is the actors.
The system is not really particularly amenable to filmmakers who write and direct their own work. It's much more about the studio already having a property that has a marketable concept and then hiring the director on board.
If you're a wildlife filmmaker and you're going out into the field to film animals, especially behavior, it helps to have a fundamental background on who these animals are, how they work and, you know, a bit about their behaviors.
I think naturally I'm a very visual kind of person. If I wasn't in filmmaking, I'd be in something related to visuals. And I used to actually work as a visual-effects artist.
We have filmmakers who make films with some kind of responsibility and take cinema seriously like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Prakash Jha. But now these people also take stars... Without stars they cannot work.
There are certain filmmakers I'd like to work with that I don't think would take a risk with me, because I could be distracting in their film. It'll take a couple films to prove to them that it's worth the risk.
When that happens - when risk is taken and the filmmakers dive into the subject matter without a parachute - very often what you get it something with those qualities that make it age well with the public.
With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories.
There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.
Unlike with any other art form, filmmakers have this unique web of festivals. There are hundreds. It is a democratic system in which you submit films, and if they are good enough, they play. The only barrier to entry is the submission fee.
If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job. And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks.
Some documentaries are made by people who are driven more by one particular story, or have different backgrounds or ambitions, but I'm always looking for projects that let me be the best filmmaker I can be, and to be stretched and grow further.
I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.
When I was acting, I was always asking abut the mechanics of filmmaking. I decided I would learn what everyone on set was doing, so I would feel less threatened.
I think of myself more as a filmmaker or as a film person than as strictly just a writer. I don't come out of playwriting or anything like that.
Film is an emotional medium; it's not a logical medium. It's not an intellectual medium, so every decision you make as a filmmaker and an actor has to be emotional in some way, even in the rejection of logic.
