Top 40 John Hillcoat Quotes

There is a capacity for violence we all harbour, and under certain circumstances, it comes out.

I love working with ensemble groups of actors.

I like the realism of anti-heroes. It’s a healthy thing. I think heroes can be very unhealthy at times because it doesn’t connect you to reality.

I like restraint. Even with actors, restraint is something that I work on the most.

It’s not awards per se that bother me; it’s entirely to do with the impetus they give for marketing a film.

Basically, I frittered away the Nineties making pop videos and being pretty self-indulgent.

It’s great to make strong, powerful films, but in terms of people wanting to finance them, it’s also very difficult.

The last time I played video games was ‘Space Invaders.’

I’m actually a humanist, believe it or not, and I believe even when people are corrupted, even when they’ve gone to the dark side, they are still human beings.

Any way you want to slice it, the thing about the apocalypse is, since the beginning of time, it’s the projection of mankind’s worst fear. The day that, as a race, our number is up.

When you have a major movie star, and then they’re surrounded by local extras, it takes me out or makes me more conscious of what’s going on, as opposed to losing myself in the movie.

When you’re working with an ensemble, I think you really need different energies because you don’t have much time with each character to make them feel real. You want strong personalities that are very different.

I like to do commercials that are more than just flogging a product. It needs to have something to say. It’s always an opportunity for a director to say something substantial and interesting.

Film has its own innate poetry.

What was so amazing and inspiring about ‘GoodFellas’ was that it showed the foot soldiers; the people more at the bottom as opposed to focusing on the godfathers and the guys at the top.

Comedy, I’m still in awe of. I think you need a comic genius somewhere in the mix. It’s got to be the actor or someone. But the ‘comic genius’ actors are the darkest people on the planet – and that kind of scares me!

My own personal aesthetic is all to do with real actors and real locations and a kind of almost hyper reality and actuality to things. But the digital world, I explore that through other mediums, with music videos and commercials. Even ‘The Road’ was a real learning curve for me with digital effects.

We talk about that a lot: how, when you’re under pressure, it brings out the best and the worst in people.

I kept hearing about this incredible guy called Tom Hardy. I started watching his work, and I was awestruck – he was amazing.

I’ve learned a lot about getting film sensibilities on digital.

I like to keep a calm set.

I love ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘2001.’

I have always thought of films as stories for the world.

Bands are actively seeking more film involvement – because the days of recording albums and MTV and even touring, to some extent, are gone.

I think it’s human nature that if we don’t have our own family, we will create a family, because it’s human nature, and it’s that element of trust and dependency and love and all of those sort of things.

It’s such an intense thing to make a film.

I take very seriously that challenge of trying to do genre films – but elevated genre films.

I consider myself a humanist. Even if I do very dark worlds, I try to make those characters real humans as opposed to just cartoons.

Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – I steer away from them. They’re alienating us socially as well as bringing us together.

In Australia in the ’70s, there was a real embrace of different genres. And then George Miller did ‘Mad Max’ by the end of the ’70s, the beginning of the ’80s. And it was really thriving.

For all the spectacle of CGI, there’s something alien and unreal about that domain, like a videogame.

The Globes are voted for by anyone in L.A. who’s ever written for a foreign newspaper or magazine. That means, like, Romanian cookery writers.

I know the power of going to Mount St. Helens, and to see that level of devastation is quite something – the power of tsunamis, etc. But it’s human cruelty, the base level of humanity, that scares me most.

What irritates me about sci-fi is that it got hijacked by video games and also became so high-concept it was all about ideas and gadgets and technology and nothing about the human experience.

Everyone has a family, even if they’re at war or fallen apart. It’s the closest initial bond, and there’s a sort of primal element to that. Your primary relationships are formed out of family.

It’s the aspirations that capitalism is promoting as beautiful, positive attributes that are dangerous. All that is in the bedrooms of the poor and in the villages of the Third World, and it’s like a cruel carrot that’s being waved in front of people’s noses. It’s a seduction, an unattainable dream.

It’s the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

Radiohead showed a real affinity to being bold with visual imagery, so it came as no surprise when Jonny Greenwood did ‘There Will Be Blood.’

There are so many tricks and so much eye candy in cinema. What I love about the classicism of genre is that there’s a discipline. I think it’s a healthy thing to resist all that candy.

I have very mixed feelings about big corporations. Oftentimes, they’re more troublesome than not.