There's something very... spiritual about fighting. It's physically very challenging. It's for killing people, after all, so it's taught me how to look at something head on. It's like living - confronting something. Everything for me came from films.
They offered me that film before I did Frida and I said, no, I'm not capable of directing. Then after seeing Julie direct, I was inspired by it. She motivated me to do it, because we don't have role models as woman for directors.
British diplomats who worked in Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis are deeply upset by Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning film 'Argo,' which suggests they refused shelter to the group who managed to get out of the U.S. embassy.
I went to The Miller School of Albemarle, just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. As a kid, I really loved the movie 'Toy Soldiers' starring Sean Astin and Lou Gossett Jr., and when I found out they filmed that movie at the Miller School, I was ex...
I bled a lot. I got hit across the face. We couldn't film for seven days. I got hit, whacked, underwater, across the face. I finished the shot, got into the boat and blood started coming out.
I was 11 or 12 years old when I first saw 'Reservoir Dogs.' I remember after I saw that film, I kept renting it from the video store because I wanted all of my friends to see it.
Both me and Edgar are firm believers in never underestimating or talking down to an audience, and giving an audience something to do, to give them something which is entirely up to them to enter into the film and find these hidden things and whatever...
I don't feel isolated on a film set. In a way you do because you don't really mix with the outside world; you're just sort of working non-stop for a few months, but you've got so many people around you.
When I was a kid, there was no collaboration; it's you with a camera bossing your friends around. But as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of ...
Covering a Super Bowl is actually one of the easiest things we do because our most experienced people are there. We'll have 25,000 feet of film and there's no way you're going to miss anything.
I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.
'Night Watch' itself is a very Russian movie. It's impossible to imagine this kind of movie somewhere else: a movie with a depressing ending, a lot of inexplicable storylines, strange characters. It's a Russian reflection of American film culture.
I enjoy doing martial arts films, but I like the straight stuff, too. I'd like to go back and do some Shakespeare, and maybe knock out a play or two. It's all about keeping balance.
It's about the characters, it's about the film, it's about the process of making stunning visuals and a huge, epic movie. It doesn't matter if my head was covered in a black plastic bag and I was bouncing around in a space hopper: That's the villain ...
I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.
I just get focused on whatever is in front of me. When I was filming Crossroads, it had all my focus. Now I'm all focused on finishing my recording so I can get that out. It's just day by day.
I was honestly a cartoon kid. I loved cartoons. That was more my dream than anything else. But now, it's the films of people like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Those are the kinds of characters I want to play, and that's the kind of filmmaking I...
The deal is that you can do it, you don't really owe me anything, but at the end of it, I own the film. Then I can actually go out and reprint or not reprint if it I want.
As a producer you have creative control, and that's what is so exciting about it. At the end of the day, if you have made a film it's totally your responsibility, and if it works it's your responsibility and if it doesn't it's also your responsibilit...
I don't feel the obligation to have a big explosion in the first 20 seconds so the audience doesn't turn on another channel. We are trying to make something that looks like a feature film that was bought for television and I think we are succeeding.
It's pretty easy to make a film in China. A few years ago I just walked into the office and let them know I wanted to make a movie called 'Red Cliff' and they were so excited. They said, 'Let's do it!' It's that simple.
