'Argo,' 'Lincoln,' and 'Zero Dark Thirty,' three films honored with Best Picture Oscar nominations, lionize their Washington-anchored protagonists as crafty, competent, and virtually incorruptible.
You have to make enough noise to be cast in the right films, and the best way to make that noise is to do lots of good work.
When I did small films like Lily and Buenos Vista, everyone thought my career would be ruined.
A lot of my friends aren't working, especially since fewer films are being made now and there's more competition.
A lot of the films I do go down brilliantly critically and win awards, but not a lot of people see them.
I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.
Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.
I am an independent film-maker first and foremost. I have always cut my own cloth.
Altman works in such an interesting way, letting things occur in the film even if he didn't particularly plan them.
Unless it's done superbly, as in the Japanese film Gate of Hell, color can be a very distracting element.
Action films have a certain illogicalness to them. They're what we call, when we're working, 'exaggerated realism.'
The thing about '48 Hrs.' that really isn't thought about much is that's the first film where the black and the white criticize each other.
Too many films today feel formulaic and familiar. I prefer it when the familiar is made to feel strange.
I feel that, at this point in my career, I don't want to do another television show. I don't want to do a film.
No matter how many times you do it, you don't get used to the sadness - for me at least - of coming to the end of a film.
I think my films are always political, even if I don't put explicitly political things in them.
I was lucky enough to make four Bond films. It finished in rather shambolic fashion, but I have no bitterness, no resentment.
The films that I've made with my company Irish DreamTime are close to my heart. 'The Greatest' being one of them, and 'Evelyn' being another.
I think goodness is very powerful, but often evil is made more attractive in films. It's a challenge to make goodness appealing.
Theater is an engagement between the actor and the audience. Film is a different sort of medium. It's not immediate, but in some ways it's more involving.
Similarly, the Marquis is presented in this film as someone who would disturb the status quo and therefore must be kept imprisoned.
