Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?
It's strange the way people hear and see things. Like going to films - —violent films. To me, seeing violence in a film makes me hate the violence. But there's beauty in violence if it's put over the right way.
Before, it was just about making the films - and now it's releasing them. Which is a steep learning curve.
I think you have to take the whole idea of wage equality out of the film industry.
I had not starred in an independent film and it's about a woman who owned a hair salon.
Part of the film business is, if you want an apple, you buy an apple.
Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.
I think of a film as being like a toy train.
The French have got to understand that a film is so expensive that it can no longer afford to be regional or even national in scope.
I don't get the romances. I did try - a film called 'Roseanna's Grave' in the 1990s. I liked it. But the audience didn't come.
When I heard about the first Tomb Raider, I was very interested and I would have liked to have directed that. When I was approached for the second film, I was delighted.
This film, Tomb Raider 2, is a big challenge. It's quite exhausting.
I felt, "Oh, film is a great art because I can pull in music and visual imagery, and it has its literary aspects and drama." Film was a sort of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, as opposed to opera, which Wagner had thought would be. That's another art form that has seen its best days.
By the time you arrive at Sundance as a filmmaker, you've been living with your film intimiately, and scrutinized every frame, and probably aren't happy with - or at least I'm never happy with it - and you've seen it in the roughest of states, and you lose perspective, really.
Film sets are a strange place, but an exciting place. I do love my work; I really enjoy going to work. But if you just spend all your time on film sets or even on stage, you can become a Michael Jackson figure, living in your own little universe.
The foundation for film acting is stage acting.
I don't really like movies that are all one or the other. It's really about the play between both of them. Now that I've said that, there's actually lots of movies that I like that are one or the other but it's just not for me as a filmmaker.
I view filmmaking as a director's medium.
It is deeply moving, powerful, and disturbing. A film that must be seen.
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
I have watched people who have nothing to do with the film business, but who have become part of the circle for a short period of time. They can be truly devastated when the film wraps and people leave.
I have an intense obsession with making films. I not only love to make films, I perhaps need to make films.
Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.
My wish is to bring my heroes to the big screen, and many of them have already appeared in my films.
Making a Hollywood film you don't have a very big movie because they have a Safety Captain and insurance people on the set. They have to check first. 'Don't do it. Let me check. Make sure everything is safe.'
