The smallest detail can contribute to the whole, I think particularly with emotion, you want it to be as authentic as it can, whether its a artifact or a theatrical event. But the whole is the sum of so many images.
If I can't make the kind of film that I want to make, then the hell with it.
It doesn't take any imagination at all to feel awed
I always thought the editor should cut the film and so I'll come in and look at the movie. Just because that's the only way I can really see the ideas of the editor, it's really working together. Yes it's a hierarchy, yes I'm the boss, but I like to see and to think about the idea, and it's about us asking, 'do we have to say that?' and, 'how do we make it there?' So it's advising the editor, it's very give and take, it's very free, but in the end, it's wonderful once you get through the first couple of cuts.
Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.
So much of the work is intuitive. The resistance you detect is just that, a kind of evasion, a sense that too much analysis will inhibit creativity.
I love stories and I don't like to repeat myself. And I look for new stuff, and as they say it gets harder.
I had always been wary of doing any autobiographical movies, truly feeling at home with fiction.
It's spiritual, a man that has a past and regrets, but you can as a director take a shot, and there's something in the eyes and the face, you just can't fake it, you can't teach it, and I think Ed Harris has that quality.
In terms of how I work with actors, having worked so heavily on the script I have a very clear idea of the characters; they are reasonably well illustrated in the script. If you cast it right, to a great degree you can hand it over to the actor and I just make suggestions. I'm not the kind of director who needs or wants to get into too much finessing. Ideally, when you hit the set, you have this conversation, like, 'eh, what did you think?' 'I don't know, what did you think?' 'Why don't we just try it again, make a few physical changes.'
Music stops you from thinking.
Sixty-five days principle photography, five-day weeks, which is the only way I'll work. With my cinematographer Russell Boyd, we take as much time as possible before pre-production, looking at stills. The next most important thing: he will come to me and talk about lenses. And I'll see his plan, which is generally great, and I might talk about how the light will be, handheld or not? I talk very freely, and try not to talk specifically, just talk around it, because it can unlock all sorts of things.
I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries.
I became obsessed with the true stuff, and that led to shaping 'The Way Back' screenplay somewhat toward a minimalist style, to avoid free-hanging moments, and to hold the music back, so it would never lead you to an emotion, and to try to make the emotions as real as I could.
When I began making films, they were just movies: 'What's the new movie? What are you doing?' Now they're called 'adult dramas.'
What we love that 'The Way Back' is not subsidized, it's alive and kicking. And if I can't make the kind of film that I want to make, then the hell with it, I've had a great run. But I'm more concerned with the younger people coming up that want to make this kind of film.
I love a chance to shoot real locations, because in films in the earlier days before people traveled as much, it was exotic to see a film set in Switzerland, and that area has been taken over by CGI, mostly, and fantasy landscapes. It's unusual to see this much landscape, people say it's old fashioned. So what you're referring to is there was that period in the '50s and '60s when there were epics and you saw landscape.
I'm not from a theatrical background where people do like to work it out on some stage space.
I don't know if there will ever be an ideal way of selling an original picture. Because everything you're doing, you're inventing.
With war and famine and flood and special effects films, when you do somebody under duress, you have to be really be inventive and the risk of keeping it very simple is you might loose some of the audience because it's not overt, it's hidden, not coming at you. Then you might cut through to some of this numbness and reach something profound and tragic.
There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.
I carve stone. I've got hammers and chisels and I carve from sandstone. I just did a big mural of birds and trees.
The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.
Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.
Various studios are still shooting on film with digital grain and the DI negatives, it's not ideal. We should really be all film or all digital. But that being said, the old way of graining in the camera, now you can make changes like a painter. It's dangerous because you can ruin the film, you can over-fiddle. We've all seen films and gone 'what the hell is that?'
