I stand to learn more working as an actor with really talented people than I do by directing a feature.
Working on ‘Westworld’ has been an incredible experience in learning to make something with the scope of a feature on a TV timeline with a budget nowhere near what you would expect for a feature film equivalent.
One of the differences between HBO and other television is that they demand the same coverage that you would have in a feature film. We need to have all the shots in order to make it as rich and as stunning as it looks. We can’t cut any corners.
Traditionally, in America, we have accountability as kind of a key feature of each branch of government in some way. So, you know, you obviously have to run for office. Or if you’re a judge, you’ve got to be nominated by political officials and so on.
I have done a lot of work in Hollywood myself. I worked in television for roughly 10 years, from the mid-’80s to mid-’90s. And I was on staff at a couple of shows. I did some feature films, including originals and adaptations.
I don’t think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it’s important to be able to remember things accurately.
About half the scripts sent to me feature characters I just can’t identify with, particularly one-dimensional businessmen or, if it’s a comedy, some absurd 10-year-old Japanese stereotype, some role related to IT or business… There’s no point in getting mad about it; it’s just the way things are.
Television is an excellent training ground for a director. If you work consistently in television, as I did, you have to come in on time and on budget. What you are allowed in feature films are, fortunately, more time and a larger budget.
It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened – an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness.
Feature filmmaking is a very powerful medium. It has a hold on me now.
Be careful not to start a company that really belongs as a feature of another company, like the 25 Twitter URL shortener companies out there. Pick a real problem that’s here to stay.
‘The Best Man’ was my first feature film, and I didn’t want to be known as a director who only does romantic comedies.
Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn’t feature.
I’m interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you’d see in a typical feature film.
Commercials certainly pay more than films. I was pleasantly surprised at the profitability of commercials when I did my first ad for a popular soap brand years ago. I was paid a huge amount of money for a mere 30 seconds of screen presence. After that, ads have been a regular feature in my career.
That’s what happens in feature docs. The more time you spend, the more nuance emerges, the more a story evolves – but it’s different than fiction, where you can reshoot something.
At the start of the 21st century, Britain is caught in a confusing riptide of anxiety. Of course racism still exists, but things have improved to a point where many ethnic minority Britons do not experience it as a regular feature in their lives.
I started writing this feature comedy in New York – a Chris Farley vehicle. The script was decent. When I got to LA, I met some new friends in film school and had them read my script and give me notes.
I took an incredibly roundabout route getting into feature films.
It’s so important to create roles and characters and projects that feature black people in a way that’s not specifically targeted towards the niche market, which is, like, a black movie is created, and it’s produced and pitched so that only black people will watch it.
The ‘Reader’s Digest’ used to run a feature called ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.’ The new wisdom – post-Trump and Brexit – is that it doesn’t.
This is going to become a battle for access to your home and office plus mobility. It’s about who can provide the biggest and least expensive and fastest pipe to your home and office and offer you a mobility feature.
You can count on one hand the number of Novus Ordo churches in this country that feature a fully Catholic music program of any quality, consistent with the Roman rite tradition.
One of my favorite outfits is one I picked up on a trip to Chandigarh. I’ve worn it once and am skeptical about wearing it again in spite of loving it so much, thanks to the ‘fashion police’ who won’t wait a second to splash it out in the papers or feature me in the ‘same to same’ blog.
I think feature films sell on the idea, and I think TV works based almost entirely on execution. I don’t think anybody is going, ‘Wow, that show is executed poorly, but the idea is so cool I just have to keep watching.’
I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.
I would argue that racism, for example, is a feature of machine learning – it’s not a bug.
I’ve passed up on many a thing that could have made me a big artist or something. Like, I was offered a feature on a Christina Aguilera song and I turned it down. It just wasn’t right. She’s cool, but it just wasn’t right.
The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion – ‘Everything’s great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it?’ Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.
People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don’t see themselves as storytellers.
Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.
I mean, journalism is very detailed… you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don’t think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.
I was working in commercials and music videos, always with the goal of working in feature films.
Then that did very well at the box office, so before you knew it, we were in a string of feature motion pictures. Then they announced that they were going to do some spinoffs of us.
Religious freedom, often referred to as the first freedom, is of central import to the American experiment. As such it should feature prominently in U.S. foreign policy.
I actually watched ‘Lord of the Rings’ right when it came out, so maybe 2001 or 2002 or whenever that was. But I watched those movies, and I ended up loving them so much that I found every behind-the-scenes feature and every sort of ‘making-of’ clip they had.
I like doing them and they’re ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don’t have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They’re really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.
I think feature film can be quite conservative, because you have to now get audiences to come out, and it’s quite a hard thing to do. Of course, television can be conservative too.
Our feature film, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Two,’ has a built-in fan base from the original film.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
To an observer situated on the moon or on one of the planets, the most noticeable feature on the surface of our globe would no doubt be the large areas covered by oceanic water. The sunlit face of the earth would appear to shine by the light diffused back into space from the land and water-covered areas.
I started off writing TV adverts. I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film.
‘The Full Monty’ was my first feature script, and I wasn’t that skilled at it.
The football playoffs feature one-off affairs, without bad feelings building from weekend to weekend. In addition, football uses platoons for offense and defense and kicking, so only the interior linemen have a chance to really get up close and personal with one another.
I guess I would model myself after the Bill Condons, the Frank Darabonts and the David Nutters if I were to direct a feature, which I would love to do, by the way.
‘Obvious Child,’ the short, had a nice life online and a great festival run, but the short and the feature still stand apart from everything else I’ve done. I play a woman who you might meet in life. My other work is much more heightened.
I try to satisfy the desires that people have to have their books personalized. That’s a value, or feature, of bibliophilia that may vanish. How do you get your e-book signed? The idea of people standing in line to get my signature in their book, it’s hard to turn them away.
A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.
With a series, keeping the quality high and writing incredibly fast, that’s the first lesson you learn. You can’t be real precious. When you’re doing a feature film, you have 2 1/2 months; you sort of take your time. It’s a different animal.
My best feature would have to be my hair. That sounds so cliche – but my hair is like a separate entity.
