I think there is an immense charm and humanity about the Bollywood structure, probably in the way there was about Hollywood film in the '30s and '40s. Somehow they were less distracted about hardware, and more about production values and people, you ...
I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself.
I think the camera was always my obsession, the camera movements. Because for me it's the most important thing in the move, the camera, because without the camera, film is just a stage or television - nothing.
Well, I've been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them.
To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.
I've never done a film before where every single person in the audience knows the ending. I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days. People are blogging your endings from their cinema seats.
You can get any film now basically for free, and that's where I think the model we're talking about is - if you give people what they want, how they want it and when they want it, they're more likely to pay for it.
I'm a single father, I don't like to be away from my son. So I'll go out, make a film and come back. Repeat. And it's worked out very well for the last 11 years.
Personally, I consider 'Titanic' the most brilliant example of successful counterprogramming; the film actually countered itself by embedding an epic chick flick within a classic disaster movie.
I was going to go make a film in Greece. if they caught you with this much marijuana, they threw you in jail, no questions asked, and I was trying to stuff it in my deodorant bottles. I thought, what I am doing?
I did like 'Star Wars' when I was a kid. I saw the prequels first; I didn't see the full original films first all the way through.
Unfortunately, I ended up kind of getting sadly duped, in a way. I haven't had an agent in 10 years, and now I'm doing some of the most interesting films I've ever had an opportunity to play in.
It might sound odd, but I want to thank Michael Bay because he's been saying how important it is to show 3D with the right luminescence. And that's very important for this film, a lot of which was shot at night or with very low illumination.
I went to a theater arts school, so I'm interested in many different projects, whether it be film, television or even live theater. I'm a performer. That's what I do. That's what I want to do.
I'm a working actor so I never really pick a film because of a genre, and I don't really turn them down because of genre. Anything that's unlike the picture I just finished is always more interesting.
I think part of the reason ideas haven't come in is that the world of cinema is changing so drastically, and in a weird way, feature films I think have become cheap. Everything is kind of throwaway. It's experienced and then forgotten.
In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood...
One can never anticipate how audiences will respond. One of the lessons that I've learned over the years is to that no matter what my feeling or opinion might be about a given film, once you give it to the audience, they own it.
You know what I did? I turned down an offer to do 'Enemy of the People' with Steve McQueen. It doesn't matter that the film was never really released. A movie like that, successful or not, adds to your credits. It leads to other roles.
From a production point of view, I still have one foot firmly planted in the independent film world, and much of the shooting on 'Jumper' was done 'Swingers'-style because that was the only way we could afford to do it.
I've done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn't use them because it didn't match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.
