If it helps me in the way that if this movie is successful, I get to make more films, great, and the more films that I make and the more interest that I’m allowed to cover, the better for me and the better, hopefully, for the people who like to watch me.
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is a movie that really impressed me as a teenager. And also ‘Blade Runner.’ And ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ is also one of my favorites. I’m always looking for sci-fi material, and it’s difficult to find original and strong material that’s not just about weaponry.
For eight years I did effects for other movies until I got my movie made.
My love for American music and American movies is from an early age. I was 10 or 11 when I heard Fats Domino and Little Richard and Buddy Holly. And the movies, my dad used to take my brother and I to the movies every Friday. It was incredible: we got to see just about every movie that came out for a period of years.
Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I’ve never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.
I joke that a person of color would never make a movie like ‘Midnight in Paris.’ Nostalgia isn’t so enticing.
The two real leads in ‘Children of Men’ are Clive Owen and the social environment. You know, this same movie without the social environment maybe is just like a generic chase movie.
My favorite movie of all time is ‘Rocky.’
I think if you make a good movie, people walk away arguing.
‘The Vow,’ I didn’t know if people were going to want to see it, but we felt good about it. We we’re like, ‘Alright, either way, I liked the movie for what it was,’ and I think we knew exactly what we were trying to do.
I’d actually love to do more comedy, but what I really wanna do is an indie drama – an intense indie road-trip movie.
I think that came out of watching all those serious movies for all that time. If you watch a movie like Zero Hour, Sterling Hayden is pretty funny, and so are the guys in the cockpit.
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
There’s an excellent movie we have on TCM called ‘It Happened on Fifth Avenue,’ which was originally going to be directed by Frank Capra… but just before he was going to start working on it, he came across this story called ‘The Greatest Gift.’ And that turned into ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’
I think mostly it’s the adventure that I will have in making the movie. That’s what I look for.
For each movie that I do, I like to find a specific language to tell the specific story.
If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.
When I was young and it was someone’s birthday, I didn’t have the money to buy nice presents so I would take my mom’s camera and make a movie parody for whoever’s birthday it was. When I’d show it them, they’d die laughing. That reaction was a high for me, and I loved that feeling.
I met two of my movie heroes. I met Tom Hanks, and I met Steven Spielberg. Oh and Quentin Tarantino.
I did movie star impressions as a kid in high school. Somehow they just got out of hand.
Salman Khan did not help me get movie offers. What rubbish! Will any producer take a risk of millions of rupees at the instance of any person? Everyone knows that the film industry is highly competitive, and one gets a job on one’s talent only and not on any recommendation.
I would come home and re-create every movie. Our backyard became a battleship, a war zone, a western town.
Being in a successful marriage is no different than being cast in a successful movie. It’s all about who you pick; in that first moment, did you pick the right person? I think you need to pick somebody who’s more interested in being married than in getting married.
The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.
A lot of movie stars are not great actors; they’re just very good-looking. And when they start to age and they don’t have the looks any more, then it’s over.
If you have a good movie in hand and it is successful, you gain confidence to experiment.
I have no idea why one of our most original filmmakers would want to spend two years of his life translating someone else’s movie from Spanish into English. And it wasn’t such a good film in Spanish, either.
I got my story, my dream, from America. The hero I had is Forrest Gump… I like that guy. I’ve been watching that movie about 10 times. Every time I get frustrated, I watch the movie. I watched the movie before I came here again to New York. I watched the movie again telling me that no matter whatever changed, you are you.
I turned to my mom and said, ‘I’m going to be a martial arts movie star.’ She didn’t believe me, and neither did my dad. They both thought I would grow out of it. That it was a phase. I decided then I was going to do it or die trying.
What’s so cool about movies is once you’re done with the movie, you put it away and come up with a whole new different idea with different characters and a different world. But in TV, you build these characters, and you build this world, and then you’re there for however long you do the show.
If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.
I think being Jewish has been covered really well but almost nothing about being fundamentalist Protestant. For years, I’ve had a movie in my mind called ‘Total Immersion’ that looks to my life as a kid where you’re immersed in this different worldview from almost everybody around you.
Growing up, I would watch a movie on video and would go to the back of the VHS and locate the address for Universal Pictures or MGM or whatever. I’d write to the studios asking them if I could be in a movie. They never wrote me back.
I wanted to make a movie, because the whole life of the movies appealed to me. You work hard for three or four months, then you don’t work at all for a couple of months.
I’ve always thought that there is a great female James Bond movie to be done. I’m not literally calling her Jane Bond, I mean, but a female secret agent.
Sunset Boulevard opened in August 1950, and it was pronounced the best movie ever made about Hollywood.
There are two phases to a movie. First you shoot the movie, and then you make the movie. Generally, post-production is longer than filming.
I’m always for the Indian in the cowboy movie. Always.
Angelina came up, and as soon as we said hello, I thought, This is going to be great. I’m really going to love doing this with her. And I did. And then I was very excited to do the movie after that.
What was bizarre, when I was younger, I never watched TV. I would rather watch a movie 100 times than to watch a TV show, just to find another nuance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched ‘On the Waterfront’, just to find a flaw so that I can learn and try to improve my thing.
If you look at the movie ‘Belly,’ I identify with Sincere the most. I am a gangster. I love my lady to death. I’m not in the game for the wrong reasons. I’m not in the game for the glory. I’m in the game to survive so the people that I love could be straight. I’m a highly intelligent individual.
You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can’t be four hours; it has to be two hours.
I’m trained in musical theatre and ‘Pitch Perfect’ is the first movie where I get to really belt out. I beat Adele for that role.
‘Boomerang!’ I love that movie just because of Halle Berry, Robin Givens, Eddie Murphy, Grace Jones and Eartha Kitt. There were so many characters. As an actress, to see African-American actors be so diverse was different from what I was used to seeing.
When it comes to Vijay Antony, he’s very calculative and is ready to go to any extent for the success of the movie.
An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.
You’ve got a movie where the pro-choice family gives their daughter no choice. The pro-life family murders. What seems to be the good mother, the kind of hippie painter, sweet and cute mother has no love for her daughter really.
Somebody with a billion followers can tweet, ‘See my movie,’ and it can still tank. Followers don’t always translate into success because I think people are too savvy. When something takes off, it’s because people are connecting to it – not because someone with a lot of followers says to care about it.
I think my favorite movie is ‘Joe Versus the Volcano’ – or maybe ‘Multiple Maniacs’ by John Waters.
I, of course, was born as if I was a movie star in my head. Even though I had nothing, in my head I was always royalty. My mother always said, ‘I don’t know where you came from’. I didn’t have their value system. And I always lived beyond my means.
I have no self-centeredness or ego about being a movie star.
I had dreams of conehead aliens when I was little. Before ‘Saturday Night Live’ did it. And then they came out with them, and I went on to be a glorified extra in the movie. When everyone else was laughing, I was scared.
