Words matter. These are the best James Watkins Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Rather than a horror film, a ghost story is different because a ghost is what you can’t quite see.
If you look at ‘The Sopranos,’ there’s this notion of a criminal element on its last legs.
As a screenwriter, you are so used to things going in directions that you wouldn’t have taken, so to be able to say, ‘This is how I intended it, this is how I want to shoot it, and these are the decisions that I’ll live by,’ I think directing is a logical conclusion of mine.
If you look around in London, there is a lot of dirty money. People see it as a safe haven: a bolthole to rely on if they are criminal or politically exposed in their own country.
There’s nothing worse in television than what I call ‘poor man’s Jerry Bruckheimer.’
I don’t really watch a load of ‘Game Of Thrones.’
If you think about the traditional mafia stories we grew up on, it is always about the death of criminal organisations – things like the ‘Sopranos’ – the last vestiges of once proud families subsumed by the modern era.
I just think action films now have… often, because you can do anything with CGI, people do. And I don’t think you necessarily should. You lose that sort of human dimension, and you get all the stuff breaking the laws of physics.
Filming in India was very special. The chaos, the noise, and the sensory overload was all really wonderful. It was a new world to me, and being able to capture that was incredible.
Television is ever more ambitious, more akin to the Victorian novel with multiple narratives and more discursive material.
In Zagreb, the Old Town really could be Prague. You go two hours to the coast to Opatija, and you really could be in the South of France, in the Croatian Riviera. And then you head down the coast towards Split, and you get into more Turkish architecture, so you can double Istanbul.
It helps for actors if you have one director.
Chemistry’s a weird thing. You can see actors who are friends in real life but have no screen chemistry. Then there are actors who don’t get on but have great chemistry.
Directing is an act of interpretation.
For action to work, you need an awful lot of coverage. Because if you do a fight sequence, you really need to be able to creed the energy in the edit or augment the energy in the edit. So you need to really, really cover it.
There are a lot of horror films out there that are nasty, but what’s nasty isn’t necessarily scary.
The opportunity to be able to tell long-form character stories is something that TV affords and is therefore a terrain that a lot of filmmakers are interested in exploring.
I think audiences are far too sophisticated now to have an English actor putting on a Russian accent – it feels fake.
‘The Godfather’ is the talismanic giant that hangs over everything in the gangster genre.
I’ve got lots of friends who would just think, ‘Horror movies – they’re crap, aren’t they?’ I think there’s a cultural snobbery more than an institutional one.
People like to see their lives mythologized in some way.
We want ‘McMafia’ to be a tense gangster story but also a family story. It’s a collusion of those two worlds.
