As filmmakers, we can show where a person's mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it.
I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you're following your passion.
I think religion is often very different from spirituality. Religion is often about rules and people trying to control our lives who are actually very unspiritual... God can be found anywhere, and in fact, everywhere. And you don
I had some big ups and downs when I was in my 20s and the one thing I learned was, no matter how low it gets, something good will come along - something always comes out of that dark period.
I think it's important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you've got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances.
I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking
Film is a great tool to play with time, going back and forth through time, or speeding time up and slowing it down and do stuff like that. That's something you can't experience in real life that you can experience on film, and it takes you to a different place.
I think people are people and if their feelings are real and truthful, they can connect.
I couldn't sleep one night and I was sitting in my office and I realized that I was an independent filmmaker.
For too long we have been taking, and the Earth has been giving. But that free-for-all, that all-you-can-eat buffet, it's over. The salad bar is closed.
I'd like to do a lot of different stuff. I think it's important as a creative person to keep challenging yourself and keep doing new stuff. If you end up trying to repeat yourself it's death. It just becomes boring and takes the passion out of it. You gotta find stories and characters that you really want to hang out with.
Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.
Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.
I think video games and that stuff should be as violent as possible, but age-appropriate. It should be realistic. When it's not realistic you run into kids running around shooting people and not realizing the consequences.
You hear stories about directors using manipulation to get actors to do certain things, but I think when you're working with professional actors, it's all about trust. They can do anything you want, it's just a matter of them understanding what you're looking for, and the reason why.
I've spent a life loving women and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.
I don't think I make genre films. I think studios try to sell films as genres because they know how to do that. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know what I make. It's sort of a pot roast, all my films.
I think that there's an infinite amount of places where you can stick a camera. There's an infinite amount of choices of what could be going on. There's an infinite amount of places for so many things, so you have to figure out how to do your job.
To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.
But steady-cams are very different than hand-helds, because hand-held gives you that verite feel.
When I go to movies I generally want to be taken to another world.
You can't look at the Noah story and not see some kind of environmental connection. The Creator wants to start over. He wants creation to be given a shot at survival, and the true enemy is the wickedness of men.
I wasn't a big fan of social anthropology. And, luckily, that created room for me to work in visual arts because I sort of ignored my requirements. I think I was attracted to social anthropology because I liked to travel and was always interested in far-off places.
Casting ethnic characters is a very hard thing to do, but it's important. It's also interesting.
I think there's something in collaboration - the fact that you can sit there and bounce ideas off of someone. It definitely matters who the person is, because certain people... The act of collaboration, where you can talk to someone, hang out, get ideas going, there is something in that. That's similar between everyone. But I think every individual collaborator is different, because they have different brains and emotions and ways of working, so it changes. Definitely.
