I went without health insurance until ‘Roger & Me,’ basically – from about age 20 till about age 35. With ‘Roger & Me,’ I joined the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild, and since then I’ve had excellent health care managed by the union.
As for the Canadians – good actors and good directors are sometimes taken by the American market, you know, if they’re good enough.
I want to work with great directors. I want to work on good material with good actors. I’ve probably done 20 movies at this point and a lot of independents. It’s been an incredible ride and I love it and I’m just going to keep going and doing what I’m doing.
I am sure I am one of 2,000 film directors in the world that Tarantino admires.
I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.
Everything I’ve ever written, I had a very distinct vision of what I wanted it to look like. But, other directors never do it that way.
All these directors, and I would include the Coen brothers and Quentin, have a very unique vision of what they want. They listen to ideas and make people feel like everyone is making the film.
I worked with fantastic actors, fantastic directors. People I would never otherwise have met. Was I limited? Yes. Did I use it as I could have? No. But I was always ambivalent about Hollywood and what I wanted. And ambivalence in our business is no good for success.
Personally, I can’t stand violence. In any standard American mainstream movie, there’s 20 times more violence than in any one of my films, so I don’t know why those directors aren’t asked why they’re such specialists for violence.
Directors are never in short supply of girlfriends.
Actors rarely stay in touch with directors after they’ve filmed together. We go back to real life.
I’ve improved as an actor, thanks to my wonderful directors. As a person, I’ve changed, too; I was 16 when I did ‘Thullavatho Ilamai,’ and I’m 32 now. With age, I’ve sobered down. I’m calmer; I can see things more clearly now.
When you work on big commercial movies, of course there’s more money involved and you can still do some good work. But with an independent, you get films that are really close to the writers’ and directors’ heart. Somehow it becomes a little deeper. A little more meat and not as much flash.
For most directors, the scriptwriter is about as welcome on set as a member of the Taliban.
I don’t think a director should have any kids. I don’t even think it’s good for your physical health. Even guys in their 30s look exhausted because directors never get enough sleep. What I do is stressful enough.
I realized why directors are such horrible people – in a way – because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you, and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate.
I find it kind of weird that directors want to put themselves in their films.
You spend enough time on set as an actor and it’s great when a director was at some point an actor or understands acting. They’re able to finesse performances out of you that a lot directors can’t get.
Nobody cares for the product I, and a host of other horror directors, make.
We embrace the shoestring budget. We like being limited by the constraints. It inspires creativity. I don’t know what we would spend money on. We don’t hire actors. We see budget constraints as a personal challenge. We’re like survivalist local commercial directors.
The majority of directors I’ve worked with didn’t know how to talk to actors.
I’ve worked with a lot of directors who really don’t have a sense of what the hell they want.
There are plenty of bad actors and there are plenty of bad directors. There are actors who will always be bad and there are good actors who you cry for because they’re being badly directed or the material isn’t good enough.
I’m not in a ‘starry’ position to be able to pick and choose, but I am interested in telling stories of substance with great directors – that’s my only guiding principle.
It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.
I’ve been working with Spanish, French, some more American, and Japanese directors. And then I realized I have to study English, and that’s why I moved to New York two years ago.
Nowadays they have 12 directors and 15 producers and 30 writers. And all the writers want their lines said a certain way-which isn’t necessarily funny. I mean the lines aren’t necessarily so funny to begin with.
Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they’re all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
The director’s who want to be innovative use the DVD as a tool to see what people have done in the past and you have other people who will actually take from better directors and that makes them better directors.
I think we’ve shot scenes from every angle directors can think of to make it look like different villages. I’ve directed a couple shows on that set and believe me, it’s impossible not to duplicate some camera angles.
I’ve worked with a lot of first-time directors who kind of look to me for ideas and opinions and stuff, and I’m a team player.
Being on a set where the director has lost control is just sickening. No one goes the extra mile, there’s a lot of eye-rolling… it just breeds inertia. If a director is in control, the crew follow their leader. But the second anyone senses the directors are not sure, people just swoop in.
A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.
By the time May rolls around, I’m probably going to want to spend a month on an island. But if Steven Spielberg or Steven Soderbergh or any number of directors were to say ‘Hey, there’s this role, are you interested?’ I’d be there in a flash.
I’ve said this before, but after ‘That ’70s Show’ ended, I solely wanted do films that inspire me, and to work with people who make me better. I wanted to just surround myself with people who I think are better than I am, whether they’re actors or directors or producers, so that I could learn from them.
I’ve always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it’s kind of disgraceful that there aren’t more female directors.
I like to just work with great directors.
I don’t do rehearsal. Some directors prefer to do rehearsal – readings before the actual shooting – but I don’t like this process because I think there are certain things that are so spontaneous, and they cannot happen twice.
My agent in Sweden used to send off interview tapes but I decided to take it upon myself and come to London to visit casting directors which is when things first started taking off for me. I love Sweden but the industry out here is quite small so when I was given the chance to go internationally I took it.
I love rehearsing, but a lot of directors don’t, and some actors don’t.
On a lot of shows that I’ve done, we had the same directors, which was cool. But then, it’s also great to do shows where the director changes every week, because you get to see all these different personalities and see what you like dealing with better, as an actor.
I think all of the directors I’ve worked with are mostly curious about the time I had on ‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ They really just want to know about it. They’re all fans of Kubrick.
When you look at the early-’30s movies, like King Kong, the codes of acting are very similar to those of silent movies. In some of the silent movies – the good ones, the ones done by the best directors – the acting is very, very natural.
When I was younger, of course I had people act inappropriately to me. I’ve had certain directors yell at me. But I didn’t stand for it, and I didn’t let it go far enough for it to be in any way abusive to me.
My whole family is very artistic – my uncles are all actors and theatre directors.
Changes are required as far as scripts are concerned. People need to open up and experiment in story lines. But we don’t have good script writers, producers or directors. The Punjabi industry lacks cinema knowledge and professionalism. It is the saddest part.
I’ve never been a fan of directors who clutter a piece with all sorts of crazy preconceptions or weird ideas.
Movie directors who have filmed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ believe it’s a big book looming inside a small one, and they aren’t altogether wrong.
Peter Chelsom and Edgar Wright are totally different directors and worlds apart, but both really accomplished directors who are certain of how they want to make a film.
I really liked doing a number of the projects and directors, and etc., etc., I knew about half-way through that I would never be doing that again. It’s just not me. I really am happy as a part-time film composer, not a full-time film composer.
