I was at the premiere of 'Prisoners,' and I heard two thousand people scream at the same time. I turned to my wife and said, 'I love cinema!' It's the sharing of emotions together, and it's collective. It's one of the last communions we have.
George Clooney's 'Ides of March' could be the most under-appreciated movie of the year. In 20 years they're gonna go back and say, 'Oh, that was American politics in that time period.' I follow politics, I love it, and that movie is so authentic.
'Warm Bodies' was a more long-term thing; I had to write the script, who knew if it was every really going to happen, if I'd find the right actors, and so on, so I grabbed '50/50' because I just fell in love with it.
I love films where you go into the cinema and loosen the edges of yourself and you hopefully enter into the world of the film. You're watching something unfold before you. I prefer the idea of wonder or intense wonder over shock or something.
I'm interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn't deserve being glorified. Something that's forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object.
I'm more interested in photographing people who have done something, like writers or directors - even billionaires - as long as I can study them before I photograph them.
An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm ...
I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.
You have to edit the material. That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the material. Not all minds are the same. Every aspect of filmmaking requires choice. The selection of the subject, the shooting, editing and length are ...
You have to always try to think about them like real people first, and not just heroes. They have to be real characters. As people do more and more superhero stuff, the characters are what distinguish it, just like in cop shows.
Especially with DVRs nowadays, people have their roster. More and more, it's not just, 'I'll watch what's on at 9 P.M.' They have their backlog of the shows they always watch, that they record every week, and it's a matter of, how do you get into tha...
I think I learned discipline on 'Jane Eyre.' Charlotte Bronte's dialogue, the intellectual duel between Rochester and Jane Eyre's character, is so compelling that you didn't have to do much with the placement of cameras.
I think any character has to be well-rounded, whether they are male or female - they have to be complex and make choices that maybe we don't agree with, you know? I guess that's what makes them human.
My grandma was really sick when I was working on 'Sin Nombre' and eventually died that summer when we were finishing the film. But I was able to bring an unfinished version of the film for her to watch.
One of my problems with a lot of things I watch is that everybody's too pretty, and it takes me out of the film because I'm thinking that all these people look like I've seen them in a cafe in Los Angeles.
You need the actors to feel as much ownership of the performance and the direction of the story as you do to get the most out of everyone's potential. Part of it is just making sure we all have the same vision.
To spend one's life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I'm not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?
But you know you haven't done it all because you know everything keeps evolving and changing; and you know you can evolve with it if you grow and develop as a human being.
I couldn't be happier teaming up to make the feature with a company as innovative as VICE. There is so much the world doesn't know about piracy in Somalia and the people involved, and I'm excited to be telling a story of piracy in Somalia from a diff...
The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds - the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.
If you make a fool of yourself in front of a cat, he will sneer at you, if you are sober; he will leave the room if you are drunk. If you make a fool of yourself in front a dog, he will make a fool of himself, too.
