The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read.
Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.
Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.
I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.
When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.
Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.
I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.
Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
Out of all of the Star Trek movies, I happen to like the most recent one the best. I think it was the best one ever done.
I don't think Roger Ebert has ever mentioned a screenplay. He assigns every auctorial move to the director, which makes some sense since the director has run a one-off game, but if Hamlet were written last year and had been only performed once as a film, and it didn't come off well on screen for whatever reason, it would be gone forever as a literary work, and never would have been considered as one.
But the web is to some degree a broth of psychopaths seeing what they can get away with in circumstances of anonymity. Look, we live in a world where one is unsafe in various ways because of the Internet. Anything can be said. Someone can look at your house from space.
I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.
I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.
If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.
I've got things I have to do in fiction to sort of register my existence, before I kick the bucket, but it will never be my living and I know it. Plus it never moved fast enough for me and lacked cut and thrust. I need to be in the real show.
I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be the way I made my living, because the form was dying commercially.
As far as executing work is concerned, you do it all in order. You do it in contractual order. There's no overlap, it's just continuation of your ordinary work. You move from one project into another.
That's absolutely true, but one problem with the digital revolution, which may tie into what I said earlier, is that there can be a collapse of quality. You may not have liked the decisions made by publishers in the past, you may not have liked the decisions made by magazine editors or newspaper editors in the past. At least there was some quality control
Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.
I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson.
It's been very much in the blood since I started imagining films or shooting with 8mm when I was a kid. I made some films and thought about films, but then I went into writing. Becket is something that's definitely on the cards. We have to see where that fits in the schedule, because it's a big picture and I have a lot of writing obligations at the moment. I'm wary of anything with a budget over a certain amount.
The only answer to "Are you Beatles or Stones?" is, "I'm both."
I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.
I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.
I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
