I really ought to try and make a film that's a bit more cynical. But I don't think I'd know how to do it. I think what it is, is that if you're a film director, you're basically there because you enjoy manipulating people's emotions.
The popular image that Hollywood is ruined by difficult prima donna actors is nonsense. They're certainly very nice to directors. I can't say the same about producers, who I found difficult, paranoid, and certifiably insane, mostly.
Being on a set where the director has lost control is just sickening. No one goes the extra mile, there's a lot of eye-rolling... it just breeds inertia. If a director is in control, the crew follow their leader. But the second anyone senses the dire...
Benito Mussolini created the word 'fascism.' He defined it as 'the merging of the state and the corporation.' He also said a more accurate word would be 'corporatism.' This was the definition in Webster's up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webst...
You know how in every heist movie they get past the security cameras that show the hallway leading to the diamonds by jamming the screens with a fake signal of everything looking safe and quiet? Usually a guard coughs so they don't notice the blip fr...
Obama is the new kid with the weird name who people just sense is a little classier than his surroundings. He moved from a private school where he was class president and is now at the giant public high school with the metal detectors and the smoking...
I was completely with the reality TV boom for a while. I really liked a lot of the reality TV, and the one that lost me was the ballroom dancing one they do, 'Dancing with the Stars.' That was the one where I watched it and I was perplexed. I thought...
If you look at 'Avatar,' could you imagine if you did 'Avatar' for 50 million dollars? It would be ridiculous! You would almost be getting laughs from the audience, unless you got a real indie director to do something incredibly stylised.
Voting for Romney after the train wreck of that was the eight years of W. Bush is like losing your pay check playing a rigged game of three-card monte and then playing the same game again a week later 'cause the cards are a different color.
The striking thing about 'New Girl' is that under all the comedy, there's something about the emotions and reactions that feels very real - much more real than other sitcoms. Like - maybe everybody is sort of laid bare in different ways.
Listening to what people were saying wasn't even important. But it was important to look as if you were listening to what people were saying. Actually, listening to what people are saying, to me, interferes with looking as if you were listening to wh...
I think that the cinema is a physical thing. What I'm looking for is creating a physical shock with the audience. I don't care of the meaning. I don't care of the idea. I don't want to say something. I want to make a 'shock physique.'
Why the Romans, Father?" I asked him one afternoon. "Because, my child, they teach us how to bear suffering in a world of injustice where all faith is dead," he answered.
Please God, I hope my experience in downtown theater isn't over, because I'd love to keep making weird plays. I can't wait for Charles Isherwood to call my next play 'sit-com-y' and tell me to stick to writing television.
Obviously, I love Japanese food. My favorite TV show of all time, without exception, is 'Iron Chef.' Not the stupid American version; 'Iron Chef' Japanese; the real one, the one that was on in Japan... my DVR for years was set to record almost every ...
Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary revi...
If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they e...
Families can be the most detrimental things to have in your life. They are sometimes the most poisonous relationships that people have. Sometimes family is the thing that keeps you from ever achieving what you want to achieve, and yet people hold it ...
I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.
I saw 'Sleeping Beauty' when I was, like, 6 years old at the Mercury Theatre. Then, when I came to Disney, I was in the company of these wonderful artists. People like Glen Keane, like Mark Henn, who were brilliant animators who could really bring th...
My business life is really simple. It's like, get check. Put check in bank. Pay rent. I've never bought a stock in my life. I never got caught up in that trip. And the truth is, I don't obsess about money ever.
