Anything can be good. Even Last Action Hero could’ve been good. There’s an idea somewhere in almost any movie : if you can find something that you love, then you can do it. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter how skilful you are...
1925's 'The Lost World' is... really, everything a dinosaur movie should be. Like a dinosaur, this classic was once extinct too, existing as mere fragmentary footage and stills, but cinemaphile fossil-hunters have painstakingly excavated bits and pie...
Apollo 11 was the movie premiere of moon landings, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Neil was a bit of a mystic, but also a taciturn guy from what I can tell. He really saw the moon as looking like the American high desert. He wasn't someone who d...
Most people remember being 4 objectively, as if they're seeing a movie of a 4-year-old. But me, if you ask me to think about when I'm 4, I can feel myself being 4, and I am there, looking out through my 4-year-old eyes.
Remember the movie 'The Matrix,' where virtual information popped up to help inform physical day-to-day reality? Such things won't always be the stuff of Hollywood. If the Internet is accessible via contact lenses, biographies will appear next to the...
When I was younger, I used to look at movie stars with pencil-thin noses and think about a nose job. I've got a grown-up baby nose; it's not chiseled and structured. Then I saw how beautiful Audrey Tatou was in 'Amelie' and thought, 'She's got a nose...
I remember when I was a dancer and I had to do this performance and I was really nervous about it, and I happened at that moment to go see 'Flashdance.' I mean, it's silly, but I walked out of that movie going 'what a feeling!' I walked out with conf...
I would have to say the most challenging thing about directing is the sheer stamina because... as a director, you're always doing something. Someone always needs to talk to you. There are always decisions to be made and every day for as long as the m...
Usually, like, on 'Mean Girls,' the task that Tina Fey and I set for ourselves was we wanted to maintain a comic intensity throughout the movie, where people just don't really get a break from laughing. And if they do, it's for a brief emotional scen...
I feel totally lucky and happy. I think a lot of young directors feel this way but you sort of, like, have a biological clock that starts ticking and you like feel like you aren't anything until you direct a movie and you need to find yourself and th...
I'm a massive hater of 3D. I don't like it at all. For me, you go to a movie theatre and you want to be taken to a place and transported to a place and be in that environment, and I know 3D is meant to do that, but the effect for me is the reverse. I...
It's the opposite journey from what I've usually done with films. I find it very easy to go from, say, a lit, pleasurable environment, like what you see outside there, to a very dark place. But the opposite journey, which is what this movie takes, is...
When I was a young person working, everybody was older than me, so I had to kind of keep up. I'd see every movie and listen to everything played, and read all the relevant books. Being an actor, it's kind of your job to know what came before you and ...
I like to do a movie, to be on it 8, 10 weeks. It evolves as you're working on it. Little things come to you every day. It's a slow process, and when you have to pack it into a short period of time, which you do for television, the experience is not ...
I watched some serious '80s television. 'Alice,' 'Good Times,' 'The Jeffersons,' 'Family Ties,' 'Cheers'... every night it was eat dinner, watch 'Cheers.' I was actually on 'Jeopardy' with Rebecca Lobo and Dot Richardson, and we were laughing because...
Spike optioned my first book, 'Now the Hell Will Start,' and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dial...
I didn't have money to eat when I was 21. When I was short on cash, I would sometimes scam food from fast food places. I'd go into fast food chains and pretend I was from a movie studio, tell them they didn't send us the right order and demand they f...
I don't want to do anything and everything. I want to be a brand that, every time I leverage my name, I want people to feel sure that it's going to be something good - so whether it be my movies, my perfume, my restaurant, my musical, it'll be good w...
I've realized as well after five years of being on the road that if I'm going to four or five months of my life to something even if I'm overpaid, it's four or five months of my life away from home, away from my son, away from family and friends. I b...
Many friends of mine told me that normally only guys like a kung fu movie and the girls would be turned off - they want to see a love story. But Ip Man is a family man, so the women see this and go: 'I want my husband to be like this man. He'll be a ...
I am kind of a private person, so I don't miss that part of show business at all. Looking back on my career in television and making a movie like 'The Sound of Music' from an adult point of view, it actually seems kind of unreal. I was involved in sh...
