I give everything I have to give on the screen. I feel I don’t owe the public anything else.
Regarding green screen, green screen is really like doing some stage work. You have to make believe that there is a window, make believe that something is there that is really not there and convince the audience. It’s part of acting.
I immerse myself in everything I write; I feel what my characters do. I suffer with them. I cry as I type, sometimes to the point that I can’t see the screen.
I find web browsing, checking multiple email accounts, and Google mapping rather tiresome on an iPhone – the iPhone’s native interface, for all its supposed perfection, has all kinds of wrong baked in – and the screen is just far too small.
Internet journalism is not a world we know very well at all. It’s conducted more on the screen and less in bars, which makes it rather less useful for getting stories about people throwing up over one another, which is what one’s after.
Issues to do with corruption, issues of how we can straighten out our state-owned enterprises, and how we deal with ‘state capture’ are issues that are on our radar screen.
My daughter thinks that only her mum is on the television. Every time she sees the screen anywhere she’s like mummy! Because we don’t let her watch the TV.
I’m the star of stage, screen, and television now, but I’m also available for children’s parties and bar mitzvahs.
What attracts me to material are characters that I know – characters that I know people don’t know but I know – and bringing them to the screen. Spotlighting voices that have not been heard before on screen.
From its inception by Michael Bennett, ‘Dreamgirls’ has always been an epic story with an ensemble cast. I didn’t change that. The screen version remains, really, a group story.
As long as my pictures go into theaters and we ask people to pay to see what I do on the screen, I should not object if customers want to know what kind of man I am.
The tricky thing becomes: Do you know yourself well enough to then portray that on screen? And for me, I find that really hard. I’d rather hide behind accents and funny walks.
‘Speed’ and ‘Point Break’ were a lot of running and jumping, and then ‘The Matrix Trilogy’ had a lot of fights and wire work and green screen elements.
I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
It’s not easy trying to get into the psyche and behaviour patterns, which are far removed from one’s own personality. Some intense characters linger long after it’s over on screen.
I had about the biggest, longest wish list anyone could have, and 99 percent of what I wanted to get on the screen we got on the screen within our schedule and within our budget and within our resources.
I think the ‘Lethal Weapon’ movies contain my favorite performances. It sounds really crummy, I know, but although the work doesn’t look hard, it’s difficult to create ‘effortless’ on screen.
I try to always go for something… very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.
Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.
Some of the screen’s best moments were realized because a director went against all reason, all logic. No matter how incredible a story seems, it can be made credible. If you feel an insane idea strongly enough, you’ve usually got something.
Dancing for the length of time that I did, it centered me in such a way to be really in tune with my body, and I just feel like I’m physically able to do things because of my ballet background. Without ballet, I don’t think I’d look graceful at all on screen.
My first film, ‘Like Minds,’ was with Toni Colette, who was extraordinary. I mean it was basically a mini-masterclass for acting on film at a time when all you could probably see were my eyebrows bouncing up and down on screen.
The thing is, you never know with any movie how it’s going to turn out. It’s always a mystery – you’ll do pages and pages of scenes that will never make it onto the screen.
The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you’ve lost the ability to contain it.
A solid theatrical education can only improve a screen performance. It gives you a fuller capacity to read a script and understand a character, for one thing. It’s important to alternate between the two activities.
The iPad’s all about proprietary apps that are supposed to be amazing on the bigger screen.
At the end of the day, TV is my first love. I started off my career from the small screen.
The smart phone isn’t a perfect device, as we all know. It forces the world into a tiny screen. It runs out of battery, bandwidth, and power. It distracts us from the world around us.
I auditioned for Robert Redford once and I was so starstruck I couldn’t even speak. I had a mic wire at a screen test clipped to me and then I got kind of nervous and I paced in a circle and then took a step and tripped and fell on my face. You just have to forgive yourself and keep going on.
The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: ‘Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.’ You give this advice but can’t always take it.
Computers are scary. They’re nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design.
One very clear memory I have of college is that I never learned anything in the big lectures. I have a feeling I’d have done even worse if they’d been on a laptop screen.
In a way, it’s good not to be recognised as much off screen.
In a regular theatre, you’d be kind of moving your eye from one character 5 feet over to the right on the cut. In IMAX, suddenly that’s like 20 feet. So I would love to do something. I think I would really want to take the massive screen into consideration so that it would be done properly.
I have a hard time watching people getting punched on screen; I have to close my eyes a lot.
I feel like the job of an artist is to confront their own darkness and their own demons and fears. And I want to make movies that feel human up on the screen. I don’t really relate to dudes wearing spandex and capes.
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
You have to realize I like doing big movies that appear on a big screen. So the visuals and the audio have to be of a certain quality before I start to get excited about the thing.
I think the first British actor who really worked well in cinema was Albert Finney. He was a back-street Marlon Brando. He brought a great wittiness and power to the screen. The best actor we’ve had.
The guys on the stunt team are really fantastic. It’s really funny, because for all the aggression they have to display on screen, they’re actually really happy, good- natured people.
Since I wore a bikini at the Miss India pageant, I have no inhibitions wearing it on screen.
I realized I really liked the screen. I knew it was a challenge, but I wasn’t afraid of risk.
Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can’t do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.
Texting is addicting. Once you get emotionally involved with constant outside stimulation assaulting your brain, it is hard to stop looking at your machine every two minutes. Without rapid fire words appearing on a screen, you feel bored, not part of the action.
If I get a note on my script or my films, what I say to a studio executive is that, ‘You know, this is the film of my legacy, and I never want to be sitting in a theater looking up on the screen and seeing something that I don’t believe in.’ I will never do that.
It’s easy to show terrible people’s behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, ‘Isn’t that terrible.’ It’s more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good.
I didn’t sound anything like Capote at the screen test. It was more like Bob Dylan. In his early years. With the flu.
Our goal is to have YouTube on every screen – to take it from the PC to the living room and the mobile phone.
I think real life couples on screen are kind of deadly. For the most part, they’re kind of deadly. You’d be surprised. Unless they’re falling in love onscreen for the first time, you don’t have quite the same energy for some reason.
I carry an umbrella when I am outdoors and always wear sunscreen, even when I am sitting in front of a computer screen! I never touch coffee or other caffeinated drinks.
A writer appears in everything that he does. That said, I felt like writing characters with my own name, in fact, provided me with something of a smoke screen.
