What I think happens today is that a lot of filmmakers look at other films that are retro pieces, like L.A. Confidential, and say, oh, that's period. We didn't want to do the stereotypical stuff.
I would have preferred to have been in a film where I could've been more authentic or more human, where the dialogue and my approach to the part could have been more real.
I do have a concern about projecting. I've never projected or had any reason to project before. In fact, the camera has only gotten closer to me going from TV to film.
But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.
I was under contract with Hitchcock before I even met him. They wouldn't tell me anything about the film, or who was working on it. They had all sorts of excuses as to why they couldn't tell me anything.
If you look at classic Hollywood films, they tend to shoot close-ups on quite long lenses and the background it out of focus. You know, it's just a mush.
We did one pilot for FOX which was about this couple that moves to a town, and we play everyone in the entire town. So it was like a Peter Sellers film.
You know, after filming the movie the book was still just as big. I think it was actually bigger. I think Stephen King went back and wrote extra pages. He's fantastic.
Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. 'The Lord of the Rings' is intensely... landscaped. But 'Discworld' is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.
I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.
Doing comedy for film is always a challenge because you are in the hands of the editor after the fact. I am hoping I can do some more soon, I enjoy doing comedy.
Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.
I still think of myself as a stage actor. When I do film and television I try to implement what I was taught to do in theatre, to try to stretch into characters that are far from myself.
There are many films and TV shows I make where people find themselves in fantastical situations; as often as possible, their reactions to it are very normal.
Part of the process of acting in a film that you're also directing is really trusting the people around you to capture your vision, which hopefully you have communicated well to them.
For those of you who thought F. W. Murnau's 'Nosferatu' was his greatest film, I have news for you: his 'Faust' blows it out of the water.
When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it's more of an actor's medium. I think that film is more of a director's medium. You can't edit something out on stage. It's there.
Investigation was like a series of job interviews. Getting the door slammed in your face at every attempt wasn’t the exciting life of the detective portrayed on film or television.
I wouldn't do a film like 'The Dirty Picture.' I have a husband and kids, and I won't be able to do justice to such a role. You need a certain mentality and ease to carry such a character.
We all desire things that we believe we cannot have, and so my films reflect that again and again. The mystery must be solved, the goal attained.
