I realise that I do not change the course of history. I am an actor, I do a movie, that's the end of it. You have to realise we are just clowns for hire. After I had success it was great, at first, not to worry about money. It was on my mind when I was growing up.
'Game Of Thrones' was too big a canvas for a movie, but 'Dirty White Boys' is like a great old Western: there's so much compression, and it's so pressurized, it demands to be told in one sitting.
Let's get a couple of things straight. It hasn't been years and years since I made a movie. I'm not coming back from the dead - I've just had two kids! I have no intention of retiring, but I do think it's impossible to do movie after movie, because there aren't that many good films made.
From the very first movie I ever made to the current time, there have been times between action and cut when I've sensed some kind of new dimension that I haven't been familiar with before.
We always set out to just make a great movie.
I did a women's movie, and I'm not a woman. I did a gay movie, and I'm not gay. I learned as I went along.
There's got to be something that you can do that will not just be a nice honor to the play, or the book, or the movie you're dealing with, but some aspect that maybe can explore something that the play couldn't do.
When I storyboard, they're just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard.
Invisible Boy was fun. Everybody else's character, they knew where they were at already as a superhero. But invisible boy's character, you kind of grow up with him within the movie.
You never know what to expect when you're a writer visiting a movie set.
In a way I feel completely frightened of dealing with other human beings at all, yet here I am sticking my face in front of a movie camera all the time.
There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare's.
I think I've matured to a great extent. I think that I want different things now. That it's not about the celebrity status that you receive because you're doing the next hot movie. It's about doing good work.
I'd done table reads for my own screenplays, and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater, where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts, but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.
I don't think anybody wants to see a dour 'Star Trek' movie.
I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. I'm worth more than that.
I don't have a problem with my body. I don't diet, and I'm not hiding anything. I'm not going to be the subject of a movie of the week 10 years from now.
It's funny, because there are so many stereotypes out there about actors and movie stars in general, but I've had a great opportunity to meet a lot of them, and maybe it's just because they don't behave that way around me, but I rarely see that kind of abuse of power.
I don't think a movie today that captured all the things that we did in the seventies could come close, because it's like asking to recreate the seventies and the audience sensibilities and that's impossible.
I think you could take any Bruckheimer movie and do it with puppets, and it would be screamingly funny.
In a movie that's sort of a single monster movie, like 'Jaws,' once you see the animal, it identifies the threat, and you're able to start working on ways to take down the threat.
All three of my parents - I also had a stepmother - were teachers, and my dad taught high school, and as he always reminded me when I was going to spend some money on something, 'Your mother and I, in the Depression, had to decide whether to spend a dime on a loaf of bread or if we could go to a movie with it.'
After I script the movie, I have to storyboard it out, I have to budget it, and I have to understand if I can afford all those visual effects or not.
In 'Snow White and the Hunstman,' when we see them in the Dark Forest, you're allowed a lot of freedom to be able to cutaway to, for instance, the prince. That B and C story stuff helps the writing process, even though it makes it a more complicated movie.
The summer before I went to culinary school, my family wanted me to take a job on a movie to make sure that I was making the right decision. I think they hoped I would change my mind about culinary school.
I made 'Super' for $3 million, and that was filmed in 24 days. And that $3 million dollars went to a lot of things other than what shows up on screen. Once you get done with the unions and everything else, that's just, like, the basic cost of what you can make a movie for.
I don't just do a movie to do a movie. Of course I want to amuse people, but some of Madea's greatest moments are when she gets to talk about child rearing and bullying and all kinds of things like that.
I look at the action scenes as placeholders when I arrive on a script, knowing that I'm going to expand on them when I understand the constraints of the movie, the locations of where we're shooting, the abilities of the actors, and where we want to go with the characters.
Yet I never want to make a movie purely for the money.
My father was a low-budget monster movie maker, so he made classics like 'The Crater Lake Monster.' There were always creatures around. And my dad was a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen. One of our neighbors, who went on to win several Academy Awards, was close friends with my dad. His name is Phil Tippett.
I don't think that the movie industry is any more ready than any other part of the information industries to adapt itself to the information age. But it's going to go there one way or the other.
There's this group online that I frequent. It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props.
I like the feeling of making things. It's very very rewarding. And filmmaking is that type of experience, where you're forced to collaborate with so many people. You're involved in the beginning to end, you're involved with so many elements, and when it's done, you're like, 'I made this movie.'
I mean, there are things in the book you could never do in a movie.
I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.
The question is: Where would it get you if something that's a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn't get you anywhere.
