To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed.
I really want to be the black Tina Fey, where I just am able to produce my own content and produce other content for other minority filmmakers and put their voices on screen and basically be able to have free range to produce.
I know that some filmmakers strive for a kind of naturalistic approach, but you're never going to capture something that's really natural - just the simple fact that you choose to put a frame around something means that you've already chosen one part...
I would say that when I came into this chapter of my filmmaking career, starting with 'The Fighter,' there was this sense that you have to go from your instincts and you have to go from your gut, and you have to not hesitate and you have to not hedge...
I think if you look at Sam Raimi and Jim Cameron, those guys know things about filmmaking that almost nobody knows anymore. They are students of film from when they handmade films themselves, you know cut films with their own hands and razor blades a...
When I was a kid, I was always going to bed creating a story, and that was the birth of filmmaking for me. I would like going to the dream-state by telling the story to someone else in my mind. That was my imaginary friend; it was an imaginary audien...
I started to do theater when I was a little boy at school, and then, I think because my father was a documentary filmmaker and worked for German television, I was of course fascinated by what he did. Then when I was around 15, I did my first movie.
Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performa...
Well, I think one of the reasons Chicago became so popular as a filmmaker location is because New York had been used so many times that Chicago, I think, was rediscovered maybe in the late '60s, early '70s for a long time as a new location.
France has not only built a bureaucratic barrier against American culture, it has constructed a notorious intellectual case against it as well. The French spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing film production, extend interest-free loans t...
Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals w...
When I was an actor in some movies a long time ago, I was so curious about all the camera movements - why is the camera placed here, and why does it move like this? And why the set and the background, the color? It's a lot of questions for me to ask,...
'Jaws' was the definitive filmmaking turning point for me. It came out in the summer of '75 and I saw it an obsessive 55 times. They even ran a very embarrassing article about me in the local paper, about the weird kid who's seen 'Jaws' 55 times.
We shot some stuff for 'Sex and the City' on the street outside of Tiffany's, which was always crazy. We were doing something where Charlotte and my character were looking at wedding things. We were trying to do it really underground, guerrilla filmm...
I made my first film on 16mm. Then I began using 35mm. I began working in Hollywood. And I began to really understand how films were made by professionals. I have to say I wasn't very impressed.
Later film shoots’ casting calls would advertise that they’re “fun shoots” and a “good way to get exposure”—but working in entertainment is not entertaining, even though it is not what’s traditionally thought of as “work.” You kno...
You know what it is, the reason so many 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds are saying 'Drive' is their favorite movie is that 'Drive' is a 90-minute trip into what a lot of seventies filmmaking was. It encapsulates the best of a certain kind of style, and a ...
As filmmakers, we want the audience to have the most complete experience they can. For example, I interviewed Stanley Kubrick years ago around the time of '2001: A Space Odyssey.' I was going to see the film that night in London, and he insisted I si...
I don't think I can speak of the achievements of Indian cinema because it's so large next to me. It's not stopping. It's ever-growing. We are going towards the right direction. We are evolving as a filmmaking industry as actors, directors, producers,...
I still don't feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic lan...
I'd like to make mistakes on my own dime and not have a herd of people tell me what I'm doing wrong. and I'm also still trying to find and develop my voice as a filmmaker, and I think that's easier to do on your own terms than trying to satisfy a bun...
