A lot of comic conventions go way beyond comic books and include other parts of pop culture, like celebrities and science fiction and movies and books. So I go to them either as a celebrity, or as a fan, because I'm a big sci-fi geek.
The movies I like to make are very rich and full of passion. Some people see me as an action director, but action is not the only thing in my movies. I always like to show human nature - something deep inside the heart.
You may have seen me in movies like 'Fast & Furious' and 'Avatar.' But I wouldn't have been able to do any of that without hard work and determination. You can accomplish anything if you just stay out of trouble and do the right things.
The earliest movies that I loved were French movies and Italian movies. I grew up watching those kind of movies and often find the truest looks at human nature - you can find them in another country's movies.
Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.
I'm sure it's more difficult for women to make movies, especially because, in general, the kind of movies women want to make aren't necessarily going to be blockbusters. But you know, there are so few women in so many positions of power.
I don't know what to expect out of my films. My first two films were with extremely talented directors, and they didn't work. And my next two films were with newcomers, and they worked well. So I've stopped expecting anything from my movies.
As a young girl, I used to dream of giving an interview. You dream of stardom as a kid. People think they don't want to be stars. Everyone wants to be a star! That's the truth. Even grownups; they pretend they don't want to be one and don't care. But...
Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.
I'm very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren't talking on stage. I'm interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down.
I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.
Anything that's memorable about a movie is often what a test audience will object to because they're being asked to be experts. They just compare the film they finished watching to all of the other films that they've seen.
I'm not a very efficient filmmaker. There's a lot of guys, filmmakers like the Coen Brothers who shoot a whole movie and maybe don't use 12 setups. I'm in awe of people like that; I'm just not that guy.
Sometimes you do complete run-throughs of scenes, sometimes you break scenes down into little bits. It just depends on what the actors like to do. It's almost like jamming.
Once you do something violent in a film, you don't have to do too much. You do it once and the feeling of violence just stays there, do you know what I'm saying?
The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.
We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.
It's a hard line to walk, man. Cause you know you want to make this movie, you want to make it dark and real, you want to show all this stuff but unfortunately you can't always do that.
Unless you're trying to make a movie on the sly, there's no way to get around this. If you want to use public spaces, film on the streets, have the cooperation of the police, you have to have a permit.
I actually taught perceptual psychology at N.Y.U. when I was younger. I was interested in the aesthetic impulse in lower primates. But what really interested me in Dian Fossey was that she made a difference - she saved the gorillas.
Beware of addictive medicines. Everything in moderation. This applies particularly to the Internet and your sofa. The physical world is ultimately the source of all inspiration. Which is to say, if all else fails: take a bike ride.
