I feel very proud that we have managed to stay together. In these forty years we have made forty-six films. Each one has brought a certain name and contribution to cinema.
Well, I am from India and I wanted to make films in English for the international market in India. So that was really the main thing, and then of course economically it was cheaper to make films in India.
I always see things that I can improve. But frankly with Stripes, I'm surprised at how effective it is, even today, and how vibrant that movie is and how juicy the performances all are.
I don't think there will be another Ghostbusters. I think we're all too old to do it. I think we've done it a couple times and there is not that much to get out of it, to do that would be fresh in it.
It's been about 15 years, and I've never really worked seriously in CGI and I thought that here was an opportunity to do the kinds of things that I was not able to do on Ghostbusters.
When you have a performer as talented as Bill Murray or as Harold, that can write as well as they can perform, you can do a final draft on the set if you think of it that way.
I'm not interested in a film about deceit anymore. I think I was always invested in deceit on some level. But it no longer compels me the way it did for so many years.
I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make.
I don't feel comfortable with violence, and I'm not sure that I film violent scenes properly, and it's something I'm reticent to do, and yet violence is sort of in all of my films.
When you're a kid and your father is an engineer, he goes to the office. I saw my father get up and go to the office in the house and write. But I don't see any similarities.
My way of remaining French was the financing scheme I used for Quest for Fire, with Fox funds, since it started as a 100% American production. The film was not in French and yet was French in style, reflecting my personality.
There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today's realities.
When I heard about the first Tomb Raider, I was very interested and I would have liked to have directed that. When I was approached for the second film, I was delighted.
Phillip Harrison was the production designer, though, I think he's uncredited. He's done most of my films like Blue Thunder. Lots and lots over the years.
I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.
It's so easy to manipulate an audience, but it's nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film.
Dover's cliffs call to mind the Roman invasion; the Battle of Britain; our proximity to, yet difference from, mainland Europe; and international trade and exploration, both fair and exploitative.
They studio were flabbergasted when they discovered how interested everybody was in 'those old people.' And now many upcoming projects feature older people; it's become a trend.
If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.
So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.
Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.
