I don’t know what the creative process is. I don’t know how to trick it into starting or how to egg it on.
I’m not a writer myself, so I’m forced to try to get what’s a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that’s a… I don’t have a recipe for that process. I don’t know what it is… it’s different every time.
I’ve produced my own films for twenty years now – it means I have to talk to less people.
I don’t have a style. I’ve never thought of myself as a stylist like the visual stylists I admire enormously – Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker – in which every shot has a great idea in them.
I’ve spent most of my life trying to make actors comfortable, which I think is 90 percent of getting a good performance.
The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.
Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they’re sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.
Stars are like thoroughbreds. Yes, it’s a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best – whatever it is that’s made them a star – it’s really exciting.
You’re fighting a losing battle if you expect the people who own the studios to make moral choices.
American movies are the most popular movies everywhere, and it is true that the quality is far from uniformly terrific.
I’m 47 years old, and I have to accept the fact that I’m probably not going to set the world on fire… If I was going to do that, I would have done it by now.
We progress by leaps and bounds technologically, medically – we can live longer, we can… but you know, in the year 1230, they knew as much as we know now about the human heart.
If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.
I knew I wasn’t going to be any great shakes as an actor – the way I looked, I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend.
If I’m lucky, in my wildest dreams I can make a picture every three years.
I think a lot of creative people are uncomfortable with therapy. Because you’re basically trying to ‘solve’ the unconscious. And the unconscious is where it all comes from.
I am not a farceur. I am not Blake Edwards.
I’m as much a victim of the romantic myth of ‘getting away’ as anyone else. My head tells me it’s myth, but I don’t want to believe it is.
I am not a cult director at all. I make Hollywood movies.
I really think that people never go wrong by telling the truth.
Everybody’s trying to make blockbusters.
And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.
Compliments aren’t really a journalistic angle.
The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype.
I always go for the craft first because, to me, that’s like an oil well – you either hit the oil or you don’t.
I hate to say it as a pejorative term, but I work for the Hollywood system for the most part.
I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.
By the time I’m done with a project, it’s taken so long that I usually don’t even like it anymore. I only see the things I wish I’d done differently.
It’s a terrible mistake when it gets to be a contest of egos. The actor is always going to win. If a director gets into a control situation and is overbearing, it’s deadly.
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