I feel like I had to learn how to take care of myself and find out what made me happy aside from just making films.
I often get offered things that are so similar to things that I have done, and life is too short. When you make a film or a show, as you get older, that's a lot of time to be doing something that you're not absolutely invested in or in love with.
I always find live shows on film kind of boring. Even my favorite ones, I kinda zone out for most of it. It's just so different seeing a band in the flesh and then watching a film of it, even if you have a hundred cameras and it's shot from every angle. There's just a communal, visceral thing that never translates very well.
The film Black Orpheus is one of my favorite films of all time, which is set in Carnival in Brazil.
I think filmmakers all secretly wanna be musicians and all musicians secretly wanna be filmmakers.
In the late 1980s the amount of German films was down to four or five percent of the market, and the remaining 95 percent were American. It is now 20 to 30 percent German productions.
What is generally referred to as American-style films are, in fact, studio productions.
I'm anxious to make another film.
Composing for concert performance is a somewhat lonely occupation, but composing a film score is highly collaborative.
If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.
It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
In reviewing films, people get quite liberal about saying "the script" this and "the script" that, when they've never read the script any more than they've read the latest report on Norwegian herring landings.
In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
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'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.
One of the great things about film is that, typically anything that's introduced in the first five minutes, the audiences will by into.
Films are always different from books.
One of the things I did early on in film was over-enunciate and talk too loud.
I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.
I don't like 3D. I don't believe there is any film that I have seen and loved that would have been improved by a scintilla in 3D. To me, it's just a gimmick.
There are films that I've made that I like a little bit more than the others. But the films that I mostly watch, and see over and over again, are not my own.
In the case of a film like The Exorcist or To Live and Die in L.A., I saw the whole movie in my head before I went to shoot it. I never did storyboards, or anything like that. I had the film in my head.
The studios mostly threw away the negatives of the classic films. They had no interest in their legacy.
I don't look back or analyze my films. I just make them. It's for someone else to look at.
The studios are making fewer films. They are making more expensive films. Profits are tougher to come by. Not only because of the expense of production. But also because of the expense of promotion and hype. To boil that all down, it's more about hype than it is about filmmaking.
