Tribalism isn't a bad thing. If you're a Facebook user, or Twitter user or Foursquare user or LinkedIn user, those are all tribes... and they may even have sub-tribes. It's not pejorative, it's declarative.
We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.
A collection of huts surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and in the huts lived 500 of the original inhabitants of our area. And so it went with many country towns around Australia.
I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it's not possible to write criticism if you're making films.
Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.
If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.
I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress.
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement.
I grew up reading comic books. Super hero comic books, Archie comic books, horror comic books, you name it.
Duncan Sheik and I are trucking along on 'American Psycho,' which is sort of the anti-Superman, you know? But it's a lot of fun, too, in a much, much darker way, obviously.
One of my comics is read by more people - around 70,000 - than will see my entire run at Manhattan Theater Club. That puts things in perspective.
Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
He said, "Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie.
I think that when you're making a story... that's based on somebody, the filmmaker has his duty to do his research.
All my films are shot on hand-held cameras. These cameras took five years to build and had to be light enough to be carried.
I am interested in the gap between what people say and what they think - the undiscovered world of people's lives. Lives of quiet desperation.
Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents - you're perpetually a child and they're perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.
This was in '79. I got pretty restless there, sitting around with a lot of people sitting around smoking cigarettes and talking about films, but nobody really doing anything.
I loved cutting together simple commercials about margarine or soft drinks - all kinds of silly products - but I tried to make the commercials different.
