To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.
It's a good place when all you have is hope and not expectations.
There's lots of things that can be solved with cash.
I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.
The sun is the most important thing in everybody's life, whether you're a plant, an animal or a fish, and we take it for granted.
If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn't do it.
Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it's actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that.
People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear. Although the moment that it happens might be terribly sad and moving, five minutes later, if you're asked to remember that person, you go, "Oh right, yeah, yeah!" 'Cause you're just moving forward.
I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something's been confirmed for them about life.
If you approach India in the right way, you have so much to learn there about people, and there's so many people. It's such an extraordinary setup, and it's so bewildering how it manages to get through somehow, you can only wonder at it.
I grew up in a city, I'm a city person - I go on holiday and I'm bored.
You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.
Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you're time is over. They find you out and send you packing.
We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion where you empathize and then you're frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.
Although I behave in a quite reserved way in my personal life, give me a stage and I'll be as flamboyant as I can.
If you take a loud pride in anything, people will rightly shoot you down.
Come a crisis, we want other people.
I love huge movies. Not sure I am the guy to make them, but you can rely on me being there watching them.
It's interesting, the worse things get in cities, the tougher that cities get, the more brutal the humor is. The tougher things people face, the darker the sense of humor gets and I find that incredibly optimistic.
I learned with 'The Beach' that I'm a bit better lower down the radar.
There is a Steve [Jobs] that Apple would like to actually present to the public. They have a character, Steve, and they want to keep that story going. And it's very important that writers challenge that occasionally and not just trust their parent companies to tell them.
One of the traditions of film acting is a sort of mumbled realism. Be minimal, and do less. 'Even less than that.'
I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes. I love taking a bunch of characters and it usually is a bunch of characters, and you throw something at them that's usually extreme, like a bag of money, or you send them out to explode a nuclear device on the surface of the sun. And those extremes are wonderful for drama.
I think women assess time passage much better than men - because of their biological clocks - and they are much more realistic about measuring out time, whereas men tend to hang onto things. Women acknowledge the biology of their time, and dance through the beat of that drum...whereas men just drum.
I don't want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.
