My first instinct was to cast as close to the short story as possible, but then I realized that I needed actors who could go for it and that they had to function well as a couple in a love story.
When I have a full schedule like that, I don't see myself sitting there for a couple of months, doing the research, going through a painful process, it's just not my thing anymore.
I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you're reading comic books to the big screen.
The fear factor actually brings the genuineness.
My culture doesn't regard acting highly.
I'm not macho, I'm not a Mel Gibson sort of person.
I think that at heart I am an old-fashioned Chinese, really I am.
You become the movie you are making.
Sensitivity and money are like parallel lines. They don't meet.
I'm still a novice student.
I think life without spirit is in the dark, it is absurd.
Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.
Making movies is a way of understanding myself and the world.
For a filmmaker, it's a rare chance to do a personal film on a big canvas.
The thing we call critics are not really reviewers, they are not really critics. They don't have the discipline to write what we would term as critique - it's really just reviewers. They have a common man kind of taste. If you watch them overall, they are not different from the box-office. That's my view.
I'm aware of what's missing from my life.
Everyone in the gay community doesn't think alike.
There's a level of sophistication of filmmaking that's mind-boggling. Anything you need for your movie, there's an establishment that can make it happen really fast.
When I started out, nobody gave me scripts, so I had to write.
I feel like all of my characters now take this congested situation, they clash, and from there you purge yourself.
I'm not a romantic. In life I didn't have much experience with romance.
There's only one movie in my career I've had regrets with cutting it shorter, and I think some scenes maybe I shouldn't have cut.
After making several tragic movies in a row, I was looking to do a comedy, and one without cynicism.
I hope people don't compare 2D and 3D because 3D's new, it's unfair to compare to 2D which is really sophisticated, even when we're jaded about it. 3D just began, give it a chance, let the equipment and projection system catch up and be better, let the price go down, let more filmmakers get a hold of it more easily.
My father was the center of the family, and everyone tried to please him.
Summer blockbusters are very expensive to make. They have things that have to be expensive, such as 600 effects shots or CG characters that have to go a certain way, or a film design that is different but expensive.