I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.
I do almost all my movies in French. I dub them.
I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.
I don't direct so that I can have an identity and so I can go on to CGI movies. I had a big identity as an actor, and that's not what I'm looking for from directing. Directing is a whole different goal.
As an actor, I'm always playing solitary characters. But as a director, I'm always making ensemble movies, which focus on lots of people's lives and how they intertwine.
The world is littered with movies about people that are depressed that either did not come out or are not successful.
I think that you can't make a movie without a script. But you also can't make movies without actors. You also can't make movies without technicians. And there has to be just one person in charge of everybody, and to me that one person is the director...
I always think the villains in all of the Disney movies are almost operatic in scale.
I grew up on Disney movies and, as a kid, I always liked the villains.
I started doing my own animated movies when I was in ninth grade; that's when I got the filmmaking bug. When I was about 16, I started writing jokes for doing stand up, and then I was 19 and started doing stand up.
I'm a massive Steven Seagal fan. I know his movies are horrible, but I've watched all of them over and over again. I'd want to do a movie with him and Van Damme.
I've done all kinds of movies, but I wanna do some more independent films that are not your run-of-the-mill type movies like 'American Splendor', which I had a big part in, that are really trying to do something unique.
My mum raised us on classic movies and a lot of musical theatre.
Everybody wants blockbusters. I like to see a few pictures now and then that have to do with people and have relationships, and that's what I want to do films about. I don't want to see these sci-fi movies, and I don't want to do one of those. I don'...
I don't envy the job of people who have to watch five movies a day - that's insane.
I have three young children, and I kind of stopped going to movies in 2006. I go to see some, but I'm a little bit out of touch, and I didn't know who Marion Cotillard was.
I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.
Special effects movies have taken over the universe. That and scary movies.
Sometimes movies gloss over things, and it was important to me that this was realistic.
I don't think Hollywood was trying to do anything with me. In fact, they lost interest pretty quick. I think I got lucky, briefly, in the '90s, and it just so happened that those movies were the opportunities that came my way. Then it just kind of st...
I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves.
