I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.
I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.
All my artistic response comes from American things, and I guess I've always had a weakness for heroic imagery.
When you're on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it's very much like my paintings.
Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest.
I have nothing against diamonds, or rubies or emeralds or sapphires. I do object when their acquisition is complicit in the debasement of children or the destruction of a country.
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.
