I grew up in New Jersey and my father was a golf pro, so I was groomed for sports, but I wasn't very good, so my interests lay elsewhere.
When the first movie to show the anger people have about the war is a grade Z zombie movie, that tells you all you need to know about how afraid of ruffling anyone's feathers people in the movie business are today.
There go the goddamn brownies!
I go to a lot of independents and foreign films. I really try to keep up and see what there is to see. If you really love movies, it's the act of watching them that you really love. You can sit and watch a B-Western and have just as much fun watching that as you can a classic. That minute when the lights go down is the part where the magic happens, because you know this could be great. You're always kind of excited, like, "Here I am again in the church of movies, and Mass is starting.".
I think I entered the market around the time when there was getting to be less snobbery about the difference between feature films and television. I think there's been a lot more receptivity on television to interesting adult stories that in the '60s and '70s would have been made into feature films. I have no problem jumping back and forth. If anything, I find it less restrictive working in television.
You do form a cadre of people that you trust and who are good at their jobs and who know you and what your quirks and foibles are. It makes making movies very collegial and a lot more fun.
Daffy, of course, wants to go on the journey with him but the studio decides they want Daffy back, so Bugs and a young studio executive heroine have to go out and try to bring him back.
It's a lot of power to give the director to edit his own stuff. It's also a time thing: you don't want to have to wait for the guy to finish shooting before he starts editing.
I think Pans Labyrinth is genius.
What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I don't know how long that's going to last.
There's so little difference between television and features as far as you make the film. I mean, you have less money and it's a little quicker, but the concept is all on television.
Repetitiveness is one of the things that's most difficult to get away from in genre pictures, because people come specifically to see certain kinds of things but get disappointed if they're presented in the same way. So to try to find a new way to show old stuff is always the challenge.
My generation remembered going to the movies as an event. We would see these things, we would bring them home, and we would think about them for years because it would take a long time before they would go on television where you could re-experience the fun that you had when you watched them.
When I was growing up in the '60s I would have thought that westerns would last forever.
Avatar' is the greatest, most comprehensive collection of movie cliches ever assembled, but it's put together in a brand new way with a new technology, and tremendous imagination, making it a true epic and a kind of a milestone.
