That movie, ‘Airplane!,’ what a landmark film it was. It’s a great, great movie.
I love the Cannes Film Festival. From the lavish parties and events to the red carpet attire, this star-studded week-long event is where I get a lot of inspiration for hair and fashion.
I’m a real nature lover, so whenever possible, I like to get to the beach or get to a forest or get somewhere there’s fresh air. Apart from that, I’m a film addict and a DVD freak.
It’s amazing how much you can absorb on a film set.
‘Villain’ succeeded because we were genuinely working towards a good film. We worked hard and with a lot of conviction.
It’s rare to have even half-meaningful conversations in the film industry.
Avane Srimannarayana’ is the result of three years of hardwork and dedication which went into its making. We have made it very passionately, and for me, I am satisfied with the fact that we were able to make the film as we intended to do it in the first place.
I did a film called ‘The Escape Artist’ for Francis Coppola. I had the title role.
The way I work is, I always compose a shot list before I talk to anybody, including my DP. So I’ll spend a couple months basically creating the movie in my head, so I have a very solid film in my head, where I know every shot, and I know what the transitions between scenes are.
When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That’s what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was ‘You’re a Big Boy Now.’
Growing up in Texas and Oklahoma, Ben Johnson was more famous than John Wayne to some of us. I knew him. I worked with him on a low budget film years ago, and we’d sit around at night while waiting for a shot.
I always put in my 100 percent. Once the film is over, I look at my next, because then it’s up to the audience to decide my fate.
Having had that experience… I think, what modern culture wants to see is the relationship with the woman. I don’t think you can tell a story on film nowadays where the woman simply is there for the man when he decides to settle down.
TV’s hard work. I don’t know how the hell Angela Lansbury survived doing ‘Murder, She Wrote’ all those years. And sure, everyone wants to be Bruce Willis or George Clooney – they want to be in film for the range of characters you get to play.
Whether it’s a film, a television show, an event or a pair of shoes, everything Uninterrupted does comes back to the fundamental belief that every human is multidimensional and should be empowered to share their own story.
I never liked the idea of the ‘Royal Family’ film. I always thought it was a rotten idea.
I think being attracted to mistakes is one of the things that film can capture in a way that theater can’t. Film can capture a moment of spontaneous life that will never be captured again.
One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.
Los Angeles is much like Mumbai, the film industry rules the city over most other professions, so it feels like home.
I don’t start a film with the heroine but with the cinema subject. If there is a woman in the story, she has to be of a particular type. It’s not as if I start with Madhuri Dixit and then think what kind of film.
David Lynch and I almost made a movie together in the late ’80s. We had lots of dinners and lunches. He’s a very cool, hip guy. This film, let’s face it, is like an homage to him, I would imagine he’d find it funny.
I’ve realized I have to be very careful in what I say. I speak my heart out. Such honesty is not appreciated in the film industry. Instead, it is twisted and distorted. A lot of what I say is lost in translation.
Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn’t seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.
A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.
But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.
Why should a horror film be just a horror film? To me, The Company of Wolves is a fairy tale; it’s got all those elements plus a lot more. And we know that fairy tales aren’t innocent any more.
In any case, I would never make a film that was only one thing. Even if it’s my warmest, most romantic film, I still want it to have the more cynical view of things, showing the irony and absurdity of things that we consider normal.
Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don’t train – at all really – for film acting. It’s mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage.
Every black film feels like it’s Tyler Perry, and that just needs to stop. But people seem to slowly be looking for what else is out there – ‘Is there something else besides this type of humor?’ ‘I’m tired of seeing men in dresses.’
Sometimes you don’t want to get married too much to a lot of rehearsing, I feel, when it comes to film, because there’s so many technicalities. So if I’m in my head, I’ve gotten settled on something, I’m gonna have to change it if I get there and something was set that’s completely different.
The film business, for me, has been great, but the music business, we’ve always been on the outside looking in.
When you’re on a set it can be very tedious and slow. It’s just not as big as when you see it on film.
A film is made in somebody’s head – out of their determination to do it at all.
I’d be happy doing anything on a film set.
And if you’re a golfer and you watch a golf film and Matt Damon swing, and it’s not great, then you’re not going to believe in the golf story, you’re not going to believe in the rest of the film. That’s the whole movie, so if that swing looks like crap, the movie’s crap.
Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion.
I’ve got quite a big gay following. I played a lesbian prostitute in the TV series ‘Band Of Gold’ but I think my following really grew when I played one in the film ‘Imagine Me & You,’ with Piper Perabo.
On set is where I feel comfortable. The red carpet stuff, talking about the film, explaining your own life, it doesn’t come naturally. It’s all necessary stuff I suppose but it’s not my strength.
With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity – voiceover, the camera’s point of view, good acting – but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.
I have always believed that when a film is being made, it has to be the director’s vision.
My ambition was always to bag a lead role in a film, and hence, I refrained from doing any ads, TV serials, music videos, as I felt that a fresh face always works much better. It was a gamble, and I took that gamble telling myself that I will give it my all to bag a lead role.
Colombia is so different to what I know, and every aspect of the country is different to England, and I loved it. I loved the culture and the food, and the coffee was amazing. The place that we were was stunning, and it really was quite an amazing experience to film out there.
It has been a fairy tale for an outsider, bouncing from one film set to another, choosing my films as assertively as those films chose me. And through this journey I have not once faced the dreaded syndrome of the ‘casting couch.’
When you conduct opera, you control the stage. But with a film, the film controls you.
That’s easy to answer: I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film.
If we didn’t want to upset anyone, we would make films about sewing, but even that could be dangerous. But I think finally, in a film, it is how the balance is and the feelings are. But I think there has to be those contrasts and strong things within a film for the total experience.
I can’t take up every film that is being offered to me.
My favourite genre lies inside myself, and as I follow my favourite stories, characters and images, it sums up to a certain genre. So at times even I have to try to guess which genre a film will be after I’ve made it.
I have a preference for film just because of the familiarity. It’s what I know, and I sort of have nostalgia for it.
I think ‘Saturday Night Live’, starting in the 1970s, really gave women an outlet to be funny. A lot of those women went on to have film careers, from Kristen Wiig now to Tina Fey and Gilda Radner.
I loved ‘Life is Beautiful’ and action films are great, like ‘Die Hard.’ My favourite is the mob film – ‘Goodfellas,’ ‘The Godfather,’ ‘Once Upon a Time In America,’ anything with Robert De Niro in it.
I got into film school. I went and didn’t know anything about it. Over the course of two years, I kind of got kind of good at it. You know, I had a brief moment where I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I didn’t know you needed light to expose film.
My dream is to become a director. I want to direct a Hindi film. I have two scripts ready. One of them is a fantasy-adventure, while the other is a thriller. I’ve assisted my brother Selvaraghavan, who’s a well-known director in Tamil cinema. I’ve also made short films.
