Faith is in the eye of the beholder.
I think that a real film fan experience is about a kind of omnivorous experience.
Years ago, when James Bulger was murdered, every newspaper front page was talking about evil. At that point, having suppressed it for years, I remembered when I was four or five, I tried to kill my own brother.
It's wonderful to actually have an opportunity to get real and show how complicated and fascinating sex is.
There's a thing I really mind hearing, when someone says: "That's not my kind of film, I don't want to go and see that..." I don't believe that, I don't believe that it's possible to write off a whole genre of filmmaking - "oh I don't like subtitled films", or "I don't like black and white films", or I don't like films made before or after, a certain date" - I don't believe that.
The problem for me is that I look like so many people in my family, so I can't really see anything. Except I could say that I look rather like my father without his mustache.
I have this very strange relationship with my work, which is that it's like a conversation between me and it.
We must hang on to the idea that we can actually change things. That's the sort of environment that Joe finds himself in, in Young Adam.
What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment.
We were very clear that this film's [Young Adam] so much about a relationship that's borne out through the sexual contact, and that that's the way they communicate.
Very, very often in movie sex you see this fiction about unity. A union. That somehow these two thinking beings become one, and there's one action and they're sort of perfectly in sync, and the lighting's perfect, and they've got their eyes closed, and they're gone, you know? And then you cut to someone having a cigarette. And it's all so much Novocain. Meanwhile, those of us us watching it are going "I'm never going to tell anybody, but I never have sex like that".
I have no problems with the NC-17 rating. I want more NC-17 films. More adult cinema!
There's an alarm bell that goes off in my head if I can sense that I'm making a mistake.
When I'm in northern Italy, I walk about feeling slightly less of a freak.
I've been on the other side of the table many times, trying to get people to be sympathetic to projects, and I've been the victim of that kind of intense kindness masking extreme stupidity.
About actors' lives... I'm not the person to ask. I don't live an actor's life and I really don't know. I probably read less about actors' lives than you all do. So, I'm in the dark about all of that, sorry.
Maybe it was my revenge on people who had been unkind to me as a child. But it was very easy and a thrill to freeze up children.
We're like the raw food movement in cinema - so determined to give people things that do some good, that they recognize as real.
I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.
For me, sex is a refraction of the thing about identity. In the sexual contact, which is usually - but not exclusively - between two people, you do retain separate people.
I was just talking to Benedict [Cumberbatch] who's got a little baby and knows his father lives in his phone. We as humans are evolving really fast, so everyday we're hit with that.
I follow my nose. It’s as simple as that.
Archetypes are always [in my film-making]. It's sometimes interesting to just flip them a little bit and see the underside.
There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation.
I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now.
