Suddenly, the screens were dominated by American entertainment to the extent of something like 95 percent. As a result, audiences turned away from the kinds of films that we used to make.
In the first years after 1989, films were partly financed from the state's budget as well as by public television. Still, except for a few special cases, most films are made this way.
In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.
Quite a few operas are still being commissioned around the world, although nothing apart from audience popularity can ensure more than a few performances.
We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that's so striking is the whole area of politics.
What I loved about 'The 40 Year-Old Virgin,' the title is the easy sell, but when you see the movie, the comedy is more free-form and more relatable.
Maybe because I come from choreography, I've always felt that there's something about action films that made it very natural for me to go that way. It's story through movement.
Any film I've made, I've only really begun to understand in the cutting room. That's when the story shows itself to you, like a wreck coming out of the sea.
What we think about Paris is a part of how we feel about it. Our idea of Paris is our idea and we don't know that that's not necessarily the way it really is. It feels so real.
Is it appropriate still for a German to have a gun? I only use that as an example of a country that's still deeply involved and engaged in the conversations about how to come to terms with the past. Certainly for that country, it's not forgotten.
England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.
I don't see myself being special; I just see myself having more responsibilities than the next man. People look to me to do things for them, to have answers.
It makes it difficult to decide which to go see, since no film about say, some tragic genocide in Africa is going to get a bad review even if it's poorly made.
Whereas my producer literally worked on this thing for 10 years and because I gave that presenter credit to David Lynch, she to this day never gets credit. It really kills me.
And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
I'm a wanderess I'm a one night stand Don't belong to no city Don't belong to no man (Note: These lyrics were inspired by Roman Payne's quote from his novel "The Wanderess".)
Each production has certain circumstances that will bring you to a certain way of making it. It is not intentional, it is not an artistic decision, the way we make films, it is the way we address to our problems.
That's why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think.
I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.
We didn't shoot in 3-D. They've talked about doing a conversion and there's been a lot of talk about us doing 'Sucker Punch' in 3-D, but I'm still waiting to see.
We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps, and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war.
