I feel like there's a witch hunt by some film sites and people that immediately disregard something if it shows any sort of influence.
'Mulan' holds a very special place in my heart. It's been 16 years since the film, but hordes of fans still come up and tell me how much she means to them.
When I won the Oscar, I made a point of actively going against that and doing adventure films like 'Con Air' and 'Gone in 60 Seconds,' not what would be expected.
I remember bumming rides across town to Georgia Tech, trying to get myself registered, trying to apply for financial aid, trying to get their coaches to watch my film.
My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.
Films are a whole new world that I'm excited to explore. But being on stage is very close to my heart; it has given me a sense of belonging. I will always try to find a way to balance both.
I understand working-class culture, tribalism and the ethos of violence, so I make films about these things.
You can't really do a big character in an action film; you're already suspending your disbelief in the action, then to suspend your disbelief in the character is too much.
Any cuts that are done to any film, they're usually things that have some personal resonance for whoever has got permission to cut it and feels they should. But it has very little to do with the actual weight, the truth, of the piece.
Truth is, we offered it to Tom Hanks, which pretty much every movie in America does, but Tom passed. Billy Bob said that Hanks recently called and said he's voting for all of us for Oscars, he loved the film.
I am tired of our characters being so incomplete. When do we ever save the day in a film? When does a Latino actor get to be the hero?
I decided I was going to give up singing and concentrate on acting, and a result of that, I didn't do another film for two to three years, and I don't blame it on anybody but myself.
With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity - voiceover, the camera's point of view, good acting - but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.
We do like digital projection. We like shooting on film, finishing digitally, and projection digitally. That's what I like best. It's still a movie. It's not someone's camcorder and it got projected. That's mean, I know.
My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.
When you're doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it's a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche.
Because I found myself telling the story of his family to people without the visual aids that I was able to employ by filming them eventually. But I very much knew exactly what I was going to do.
I've had a lot of experience in independent film, and about how to choose. You've got to be very discerning about where you put your five bucks, and where you cut and what you don't cut.
I was making a film called The White Tower at the foot of Mont Blanc - the one thing I learned from that experience was that it's more difficult to go down a mountain than to go up. A lot of people don't realize that.
My first experience with film was through a still camera. I would sit, very much against my will, with my father in the game reserve, watching some elephant or rhino or whatever, through a 400 millimeter lens and wait, and waiting and waiting.
I've told people who have just started to make a film that the one thing you might experience is this feeling that everybody is conspiring against you, because you're not necessarily able to tell what's real and what's not.
