I'm very much drawn to these stories. This is a huge, great story [in Doctor Strange] about the possibility of living beyond everything, living beyond mortality, living beyond all the immortal confines, living beyond the planet as we know it. It's mind-blowingly no limits, and I think this is going to be something else.
I would say that I think the film [I am love] is absolutely about nature, it recommends human nature. You don't need to recommend change, that's inevitable, it's the only reliable thing we have.
I mean, even in terms of the Marvel universe, this [Ancient One character] is going on a side street into a major piazza that Marvel hasn't even been to before, because it's all about creation and not so much about destruction and forestalling destruction, it's about your mind.
I'm a huge Marvel fan and the fact that they take the liberties that they do in filmmaking I think, if anything, that it dignifies the comics and it says, "Yeah. This is a strong enough, robust enough source. We can bend it, it's elastic. It's bouncy."
I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child.
I remember when I first started to be photographed, people couldn't understand how it was possible to go around with no eyelashes, no eyebrows. Now it's much more accepted for people not to wear eyelashes or lipstick or whatever they do, but then it was quite freaky. Um, a kind of boiled look.
We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on.
Working with the editor on the set means that it is possible to keep track, at every moment, of the exact temperature of the trajectory of the scene - and know precisely what is required to continue, or precede, the action already shot. Like building a giant jigsaw puzzle. This is a freeing procedure because one is divested of all the options that might otherwise hamper one's choices. Clarity is possible. And that means one can relax into each shot, knowing the clear boundaries of where it might end or begin. And with relaxation, comes play.
I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste.
This film [Teknolust] in particular, showing the way in which having a sexual dialogue with someone can be something developing and changeable and maybe uncomfortable and complicated. Just complicated and human, no more and no less.
That whole Deep End experience of finding yourself with the dead body: you know you didn't kill it, but you know if you're found with it, you're gonna be done for it, so you have to get rid of it. And that's a really important nub of Young Adam Joe knows for absolute certain that if someone comes around the corner, that's it. Nobody's ever going to believe what happened. So that has nothing to do with identity or sexuality, but that is a link. I'm just fascinated by it.
Well the truth is, everybody, when they die, leaves a void that cannot be filled.
What bothers me is that the cinema - what Fox News calls the "wholesome cinema that our children are supposed to be able to see" - is so violent. I'm not even talking about the content. I'm talking about the way in which it's cut.
The last time I did anything like this [special powers] was with the Narnia film with two swords, the same but different.
The Ancient One, as you know, is the master, is the Sorcerer Supreme, and [Doctor] Strange comes to learn how to heal himself and The Ancient One has got the knowledge. And so what you're seeing today is a part of the whole training section when he's learning the moves and digging deep. So it's all about that, it's all about trying to push him to get there.
Derek Jarman shared the responsibility for making the film. He didn't necessarily know what he wanted - he knew what he didn't want - but you had to keep coming up with stuff.
This is the launch of the Doctor Strange film interpretation, of - in my view - a classic, which has been interpreted many times by other graphic artists and this is just our graphic interpretation of The Ancient One. I would say the whole approach is about a kind of fluidity.
I remember noticing, when I had my babies, how much I liked them, and not just loved them, but I was really into them. I knew I was going to be curious about them, and up for the mayhem ahead.
I always think of the word 'abandonment' when I think of the character.
A large part of my filmmaking self has to do with my love of being in the cinema audience, and my relationships to what I want to see on the screen, what I have seen on the screen and what I don't want to see on the screen again.
I was always, and I still am to a certain extent, one of those lazy people who spends a lot of time with Italian friends and yet constantly says I don't speak Italian. Things slow down when I start speaking Italian.
I'll tell you one thing, and this is banal to say because it just makes it sound like it's all planned, and nothing is planned at all. But one link is with The Deep End, and one link is that I'm making a film later on that revolves around the relationship between an innocent party and a dead body.
George [Clooney] and I do have the aim one day to be in a film where we say one nice thing to each other. Hopefully one day.
This film [Doctor Strange] kind of takes that everyday boring reality and really bursts it wide. So we talked a lot about that. In many ways there's something very practical about this world, the Kamar-Taj. It's - You know, we all look like samurai warriors, but actually there are iPads everywhere and there's a feeling that it's a practical possibility for this modern world that the Doctor Strange universe is functioning, and that we know it and it's around the corner for all of us.
If I'd been asked to play an Asian man [in Doctor Strange] I would've shown them Benedict Wong.