I mean, '8 ½' to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act of filmmaking and creativity.
I felt it was really important to come here to see what was happening in New York. So, I came to see film and accidentally I stumbled upon theater, so I discovered Andre Gregory, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and theater became my first anchor.
In the '60s when I started to see everything I could see, you could see pretty much everything which was still available from the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, and therefore I had an education which was really large and vast in different cinema. That's probably the reason I did not fall for the New Wave. It's really the love of the movies that made me want to become a cameraperson, definitely. I was really a film buff.
We had been affected by the fact that the film world was a man's world in Europe as much as here, in America actually.
1968 in Paris renewed my options. There was suddenly a desire of inventing new things, and I while I was working as an editor, the assistant editor thought I had a gift, and when he shot his own film, he hired me as his assistant camera, and I trained myself to do the light for him.
I couldn't imagine a better place [Australia] for making a film on the end of the world.
I think staying away from labels is what makes my films refreshing.
I've worked for 27 years nonstop in theater and films. That's a lot of work.
Films should be for everybody.
The films that are interesting you never can stop... there's no end point, you just keep thinking and musing about it.
In Hong Kong, in our generation that started out in the 1970s, being a director wasn't a big deal. We didn't even have director's chairs. We weren't particularly well paid. The social standing of a film director wasn't that high. It was a sort of a plebeian job, a second or third grade one. And the studio heads are always practical, there's never any fawning because someone is a director. There's very little snobbery about one's position as a director. The only ones people treated differently were those that were also stars; or the directors who also owned their companies.
Movies are very hard to make, to get it all to come together. So many people have their say in what the end product of films are.
I don't feel that fear is a good incentive on a film set.
I do like ensemble work. I would like to do a lead role, though. I didn't shy away from that. I'm desperately looking for a lead role to do in a film, an independent film, and it just hasn't come my way yet. I'm desperately looking for that role that will put me in a lead category. Or a television series.
Maybe Putin wanted to fire Medvedev , but how is he supposed to do that after my film?
Fame should be left to the film stars.
When I went to university, I finally got exposed to European films, and they had a strong impact on me. I felt those films had a lot of things to say that weren't getting expressed in the films I was used to seeing.
I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.
People like my films. They understand me through my films; it's like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer.
I feel like a lot of my work on stage, I've gotten to play a wider range of characters than I have on film. This feels closer to who I am than stuff I've played on stage, or, like, Olive Kitteridge.
I don't like pretentious films or pretentious people.
Even though I've done Hollywood films, I still don't think of myself as a Hollywood actress.
After I learn more English, I'll work hard and make more films.
I knew nothing about martial arts. And I don't really like it! But in the film, I not only had to pretend that I knew all about it, I had to be the best at it. That was very difficult.
When I got out of school, it used to be that it was theater actors that ended up doing film and television, and you had to come from the theater to be taken seriously in that world.
