I would like to do more feature work. I intend to do that. To be really honest, it's an economic thing because when you make a film that doesn't make what it cost back, it's very difficult to get back in the ring.
[Zwarte Piet] is unfortunate, and just like the early American blackface films, if it offends a segment of the population, it shouldn't be shown again.
I wasn't that much of a Disney buff growing up, but I love the mystical and magical nature of Peter Pan, and I have connected with that character through Owen [Suskind] in making this film ["Life, Animated"].
I'm not an activist at all. I'm a filmmaker, and I wanted the people involved to tell their own story.
It's very tempting to over-eat all the bad things when you're on a film set.
I'm not saying that it's wrong to make huge Hollywood films but it's just a different kind of feeling, a different sort of pleasure.
Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.
Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate. He called me a 'fat pig' in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have 'the physique of a slave-trader.' He is angry at me because I said his 'The Brown Bunny' was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival... it is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'
The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.
When I started I had no knowledge of films whatsoever. I was an engineering major at Stanford. And I found out as a senior that they had two film critics on the Stanford Daily, and they got free passes to all the theaters in Palo Alto. So I thought, I'll do that, and I became a film critic. And then I became interested in films. But I had no time to study anything in that area because I was a senior, just finishing up as engineering.
I look for the ability to work. Directing is hard work. They don't teach you that in film school. Critics are not aware of it, but it is hard, physical work.
I love films that don't end when they end, that go on in your head a couple of days later.
There are a couple of things that are, in the present, floating in front of my face, and once one of them gets enough energy to become a voice that I cannot not hear, then I will become a steamroller. When you've made your film, you stop hearing the voice.
It's happening right now... it's just not on film, it's not being recorded.
An Ingmar Bergman film would probably owe a sizeable bulk of its import and its direction and its quality to the directorial end and to the director because it's uniquely a Bergman film. But that again is not the general - no, that's much more the exception than the rule.
I could have made a small film and kept all the money from 'Life is Beautiful'. Instead, I spent more money than I had on 'Pinocchio', a very risky film.
Make DV movies so you can learn how to make films, but don't try to distribute them until they are fantastic.
I love making films more than anything, but it's tough.
I'm not interested in a film about golf but I am interested in golf as a metaphor.
The mainstream usually follows trends, it seldom sets them except for a few films.
In some ways I would like to be like Tyler, my character in the film.
I would have liked to come back in 300; they did an origins film of 300 just recently, and it would have been fun to come back and see what happened to my character.
It doesn't matter how good your film is; if people don't know about it, they won't go and see it.
The problem for independent filmmakers is that huge companies control all the promotion, all the advertising. Hollywood films' advertising budgets are as large as their shooting budgets.
The cowboy movies is not our go-to programmer anymore, here's a horror film.
