I moved to California when I was twelve and I got a video camera and made little movies because I didn't have any friends yet. I would force my sister to make these movies with me - which became my YouTube channel.
I think we grew up thinking that the funniest things on TV were the old, serious movies. I always liked the Marx Brothers, but the thing that always made us laugh were movies like Zero Hour. That's what inspired us.
I did spend a lot of my childhood playing out movie scenarios in my head. I'd walk along the road, pretending like I was in the army, talking on the radio, and doing maneuvers. I dreamt a lot about performing in movies and living in fantasies.
When I started making movies, I was pretty young, and at the time I felt like there needed to be more confrontation in cinema - or I needed to make something more disruptive - so in the beginning, those movies were me wanting to play with the rules.
I don't really watch many heist movies. Actually, I have quite eclectic tastes, but I tend to watch just foreign films. I don't know why that is. I'm not particularly deep or anything, I just like foreign movies.
Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support charact...
I don't have that drive to be in this field, climbing up, doing bit parts in movies to make a big movie. But I'm lucky I get to also do acting - it's fun. I should probably just take an acting class on the weekends - that would be enough for me.
I grew up loving monsters. I'm just a total monster geek. When I was a kid, I had the Aurora monster models, and I would make them. I loved the Universal horror movies and the Hammer movies. I just had an affinity for them.
I would never do something like Speed 2 again. If I'd wanted to make those kind of movies I could have signed up for five of them while it was in the can. It wasn't worth it to me. That was just an innocuous, boring movie.
I think I approach my choices much the way I approach the way I consume movies and TV and stuff. I like everything, and sometimes I'll feel like a horror movie, and sometimes I'll just feel like an episode of 'Hoarders.'
The dubbing of the music and effects is really incredible today. You're feeling gun shots. I mean, it's not the way people say it is, but the gunshot sounds real. And cars sound real. Among the many things in the evolution (of movies) is to make the ...
The movies I like to make are very rich and full of passion. Some people see me as an action director, but action is not the only thing in my movies. I always like to show human nature - something deep inside the heart.
I've done movies that I've been advised not to do. 'Dog Soldiers,' the movie I did 11 years ago now, I remember my agent at the time was like, 'You shouldn't do that. It's a weird film about werewolves,' and it became a cult hit.
The thing I find about the movie industry is that 99 percent of the people are absolute scum. They're horrible people, they really are. Very nasty killer rabbits who hate movies. But the other 1 percent are really the greatest, most wonderful people ...
We don't make movies for critics. I've done four movies; there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who've paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a pay...
Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and I were so different from each other. I was doing very young movies, and Marilyn, who was ahead of me, was doing a lot of homogenized movies that weren't quite as wild as the ones I was doing. Jayne was more of a ch...
I have a really hard time watching gory stuff and horror movies. I have said no to some horror movie things. I wouldn't rule it out; I could probably be convinced to do one. But sometimes, I just get ill.
I think Woody Allen calls it 'anxiety of influence.' When you're in your formative years and you watch a movie that makes you want to make movies... For Wes Anderson, it's Truffaut. I'm sure for P.T. Anderson it was Scorsese and Jonathan Demme.
I'm sure it's more difficult for women to make movies, especially because, in general, the kind of movies women want to make aren't necessarily going to be blockbusters. But you know, there are so few women in so many positions of power.
Even if you look at the 'Paranormal Activity' movies, at the end of the movie things get really crazy and nutty, but they all start in a very mundane situation that people can relate to, and that's also to some degree what we tried to do in 'Chernoby...
Everything's changed. The technology is the big thing changing now, the way movies like 'Alice' or 'Avatar' are made. And technology on the other side, the audience side. Word spreads so fast now on a movie, with the Internet, and piracy is something...
