In the acting game, you spend a long time fighting against what the director perceives you to be. And half the time the directors don't know.
It was the late '70s when my parents met. My dad was a lighting director for a soap opera, and my mom was a temp at the studio. They moved into a house in The Valley in L.A., to a neighborhood that was leafy and affordable.
If you look at 'Avatar,' could you imagine if you did 'Avatar' for 50 million dollars? It would be ridiculous! You would almost be getting laughs from the audience, unless you got a real indie director to do something incredibly stylised.
I had worked for a lot of directors whose work I didn't respect, and as I was editing material, I was thinking about how I would have shot the scenes and what I would have done to make the scenes better. After several years of that, I got to the point that I was pretty confident I could sit in the director's chair.
I don't go for holidays or celebrate my success because I know nothing is permanent. I don't let it get to me - like I am India's top director with too many hits. If that happens, I might lose the connect with my audience. The day I go wrong, they will run away from me. I want to be like an assistant director all my life.
The logistics of blood is something that I didn't even understood as a first-time director. Not just actors and make-up, but once a set gets bloody, you don't un-blood it. Once something gets bloody, you either rebuild the set, or you just don't get the shot.
My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.
David Cromer, from Chicago, I think is the most gifted young director in America.
You do small movies because the script is good and because you believe in the director. You don't care about the money. And when they disappear, it's a pity.
Stephen Daldry would be a director that I would love to work with as well as Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, and I'm very lucky to have worked with Isabel Coixet, who is also one of my favourite directors.
I don't like being pigeonholed at all. It stemmed from after 'Mandy Lane': I was being offered all these horror movies. I love horror movies, but when I dreamed of being a director, it was always doing all sorts of things.
The Almeida's artistic director, Rupert Goold, brought me Mike Bartlett's 'King Charles III' with the slightly apologetic warning that it was in blank verse, but, of course, that appealed to me.
The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.
We all have hierarchies at work - even on set, the runner would never walk up to the director and ask for a cup of coffee.
You have great athletic directors, you let them run it; you keep yourself informed, but I'm not the athletic director. I'm the president of the university.
What you can do with visual effects is enhance the look of the character, but the actual integrity of the emotional performance and the way the character's facial expressions work, that is what is going to be created on the day with other actors and the director.
Frank Miller is more of a visionary than any director I've ever worked with, and he achieves that vision better than anyone I've ever worked with.
I don't consider myself a flashy director. A lot of times, people will look and don't even know what I do.
It didn't matter that Charlie Chaplin may not have been a great director or a great anything else. He made great movies.
I've worked with Len Wiseman before, on the 'Underworld' series, in which I was a vampire. The first two of those were his first two films. And I admire him beyond measure. I think he's tremendous, as a man and as a director.
I've turned down jobs because I've said, 'Honestly, I can't find my way in. I can't do it. I love you, as a director. I think the script is good. You deserve better than I think I can do.'
For me, I never take a job thinking it's going to grab ratings or that it's even going to be a success. I don't. I just take the job because I love the character. Or I love the script. Maybe I love the director. But whatever I do, I never think about how it will do. That is not in my hands.
As a producer, the most important call you can get is on Saturday morning, when the Friday-night grosses come in. As a director, you want your film to be successful. But your outlook is a bit different. You become very conscious of the reviews.
When I decided to work with Krishna Vamsi, people around me were apprehensive about my decision. They warned me that I shouldn't work with an unsuccessful director.
It's different being a director. I suppose, especially if it's a story you've written and you feel compelled to tell, in some ways it's a lot easier than acting because you're orchestrating the piece. As an actor, sometimes you're trying to second-guess what people want.
I don't watch many films. I just make sure my directors are really good. I will work even with a debut director, but the one-hour narration of the script should be mind-blowing.
Filmmaking has always involved pairs: a director coupled with a producer, a director alongside an editor... The notion of couples is not foreign to cinema.
I refused to be filmed getting off a bus twice. The director said, 'I'm an award-winning director. Please do it', and I said, 'I never thought I'd say this, but I'm an award-winning actress with a bad leg, and if your film depends on seeing me get in and out of a bus, we're in trouble.'
There's this movie, 'Zero Dark Thirty' about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Some have complained that too many 'secrets' were dished out by the intelligence and special operations communities to director Kathryn Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Boal and their crew, part of a broader pattern of using intelligence for political effect.
In 'Beowulf,' director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called 'motion capture' to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn't mastered and what the technique can't do is this: emotion capture.
I think, as directors, they may recognize, more than the rest of the body of filmmakers, exactly what you do as a director, because I think sometimes the conception is if the camera isn't swinging around, and it's not pyrotechnic or worthily melodramatic, then the direction is uninvolved.
A director must push his actors to the utmost limit to get everything possible out of each scene - without being corny or sentimental or going overboard.
You can't be minimalist as a director until you have acquired the experience and confidence to say no.
Typically, I work with the script and the director for awhile before, just to make sure we're on the same page.
When I was the NIH director, I often expressed envy of institute directors: they had the money and ran the scientific programmes.
In Hong Kong, particularly, we craft this art for decades. The action choreographer actually is the action director. He takes over and he choreographs with - by himself or with his team, and place the camera where he feels cinematic effect to bring out that choreography.
