Sometimes I just wonder if I'm being led by variety. If one film leads me down one path, sometimes I just want to turn around and head the opposite way for the next project. I hope that's not the case, but sometimes I suspect that.
My mum thought my TV and film addiction was laziness. If you're an immigrant, you know you'll never be an accepted part of society, but you hope your children will be, and you try to make them essential to the community in a practical way - being a d...
When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse...
When I think of Camelot, I think of the castle in France where we film, but I think it's wrong to lock it down to one place because it's all part of our imagination. They are legends for a reason. Their stories have endured for hundreds of years and,...
In the next couple of years, part of every film's process is going to be to adjust the images. And it'll be to change the color of an actor's tie or change the little smirky thing he's doing with his mouth. Or you can put in more clouds or move the t...
Sometimes you don't want to get married too much to a lot of rehearsing, I feel, when it comes to film, because there's so many technicalities. So if I'm in my head, I've gotten settled on something, I'm gonna have to change it if I get there and som...
When I got out of coaching, I had taught a class at the University of California, an extension class on football for fans. I was looking for tools. I was showing them films. I was going to write a textbook. Trip Hawkins came to me about making it a g...
We had the guys from X Men 2 do the cameras. They had a 360 camera that would go from one car, up in the air and over to another car in a continuous shot while the film was still rolling, going 90 mph.
Every Friday, my dad would rent three videos. Me and my brother would ask for something with guns or fighting, but my dad would say, 'Come on, think about it.' He'd choose more involving films like 'Pulp Fiction,' and at the end of the night, we'd ag...
My dad moved to London in his early 20s and didn't really go back. So the irony is I've spent lots and lots of time in Ireland, but not with my dad. I've shot films in Belfast, where he's from. And I've shot in Dun Laoghaire. Which is great. And I've...
Whenever I'm in theatre situations I will go out of my way not to talk about my father, but in the film world I can be really proud of my family and say, 'You know what: my dad's a really, really famous theatre director,' because nobody has any idea.
Comedy was why I got into acting the first place. Peter Sellers was a huge influence on my wanting to act. I grew up with him and found him hysterical. The Pink Panther films were an inspiration, from my earliest childhood days, when I was watching t...
I have six brothers, and in the past I've done quite a few girlie films, like 'Wild Child' and 'Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging' - so when they've been to those, they've been incredibly embarrassed. They won't be embarrassed going to see 'Black De...
Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his 'death,' whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death accord...
I never played Freddy as real. In the true bible of Wes Craven's outline for the films, Freddy only manifests himself in dreams. And a lot goes into a dream, not the least of which is imagination. So Freddy is secondhand information. Freddy is an urb...
The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put a...
After we'd filmed one series of 'Kiss Me Kate,' everyone was saying: 'The guy's got great comic timing,' - that was the first I'd heard of it. I'm not a comedian, I don't want to depend on a singular box of tricks. I like story and characters, to tak...
Since Star Wars, that film's success led to bigger budgets, more hardware, that the great movies like the ones I did, which were studio movies, are now independent movies. They range from half a million to several million, and a lot of those have ver...
Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian...
Maybe they'll start making serialized movies. I watched the first couple seasons of '24' and it's really fun. I bought the DVD and watched it over a month or so and it's great. It's like reading a novel. It has a lot of possibilities that are more di...
I do feel like 'The Dark Knight' is a great film, but that Batman in there? He's almost like Robocop to me. He's almost robotic looking; he's got this surgical approach to everything... He's almost not human. That's supposed to be his whole point: he...
