As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
As a director, there is nothing more fun than seeing an audience screaming and jumping. You are the ultimate puppet master, controlling the emotions of the audience.
To me, the main and most exciting thing about photography is to meet people. The picture is the result of what happened between me and them on the set.
I sold my first short story to Pyramid Press, where it was chiseled onto fifteen slabs of granite, and for which I was paid nine goats.
I saw Aerosmith, and I was like, 'Wow, you can dress like a girl and still get girls? Hand me a scarf!'
I'll definitely say that, before film school, I didn't have much of a film-history background. I didn't know much about classic cinema.
I have these plants in my house that are dying, so having a robot butler to water them when I'm away would be pretty handy.
It's a treat and daunting to be directing someone like Judi Dench, who's made more films than I'll ever make in my lifetime.
Tom Hooper had done 'John Adams,' and David Lynch did 'Twin Peaks.' I figured I could do eight hours of television, and I wanted to.
My manager sent me the first two scripts for 'True Detective,' and I just thought they were so interesting and that the world they were depicting was so titillating to me.
Some directors don't get involved in the cinematography and are just about story, but I'm definitely more tactile than that in terms of my involvement in the minutiae.
There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it.
Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.
It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.
There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle language. Figuring out how to speak that language is a lifetime job.
Human beings will line up for miles to buy a bucket of catastrophes, but don't try selling sunshine and light - you'll go broke.
Once you have heard a strange audience burst into laughter at a film you directed, you realize what the word joy is all about.
I think that every enduring story that has expressions over multiple periods, that role of being the keeper of the integrity of the vision is a very important role.
I believe people leave a theater bonding with characters. Story is the vessel that carries character. Comedy is a very important component of expressing character.
It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.
The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.
