I have done many films across the globe and would love to be a part of Bollywood, but the script must have a strong character for me.
Well, that's the old story I heard about the Jackie Chan films. That, like, Jackie Chan will just keep going and when crew members drop he just replaces them. I don't know if that's true but after having worked in Japan I believe it might be true.
When a new generation watches the films, people might mention that it has improved their lovemaking. I guess it's because it isn't threatening. It was very sweet and delicate.
All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.
People ask what are my intentions with my films - my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct.
I wanted to do journalism, as I was an idealist. Then, in my second year of journalism, I realized that in real life, things don't work the way you expect them to. I realized that I could express my ideas better through films.
Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It's a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence. As is working within a circumspect budget.
I worked as a production assistant on a couple of films, and finally, I got a job at an animation studio as an editor. After that, work begat work. I got into directing music videos and commercials.
I want to do comedy films, serious films - I admire the actors who fly under the radar but get loads done, pop up in a lot of good films.
When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
Personally, I don't give a toss about French viewers. I make films for foreigners - it's a bit like Ken Loach, who's not very popular in England but has had a lot of success in France. Cinema is always an experience in a foreign body.
How many big American films do you see where the heroine has no vanity whatsoever?
Before I started to make films, I didn't give much thought to the way the characters were physically positioned in the story world.
Yes, sir, a patrol car came and took me down to a station where they were trying to develop films, but they hadn't got the facilities to develop colored film.
I'm trying to make as many films as I can.
I've always loved the Bond films.
It's become very popular in contemporary films to have the twist ending.
I was a dancer from about the age of four, so I was always performing and forcing my parents to watch my brother and I do 'Jesus Christ Super Star' in the living room. My first step was community theater, and then I started to do films.
The financing of my films has always been international.
There have been nine Super Bowls in New Orleans, and not all of them have brought the best of luck to NFL Films. We got robbed twice there, got food poisoning, and my hotel room was broken into on the day the Bears played the Patriots in January 1986.
I'm so lucky because I get to have all of these memories. I can have all of those pictures and different sorts of films and stuff. Some people have only one photo, and I'm really glad that I have all of that.
Stage acting is for me the basic form of acting. If you make films all the time, you have so few possibilities to rehearse. And it's important to rehearse, because it gives you the possibility to try things which are not good!
To some degree, I was very dubious of the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' idea - taking a theme park ride and turning into a film - even though they seemed to end up being quite fun films.
I don't want to be embarrassed when I go to see something on the screen. I don't want to listen to foul language, watch a lot of violence or see something immoral. I prefer stories with sensitivity and family values; films that strive to lift you up to a higher place in life.
You can get digital technology that almost is film quality, and go make little films and do everything you can to find a little understanding of your own voice and it will grow - Don't take no for an answer - Take every opportunity you can to do something.
'Funny Games' was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are, or respond to them as provocation, then that's quite different. 'Funny Games' is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience.
But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.
The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.
I knew by heart all the dialogue of James Dean's films; I could watch Rebel Without a Cause a hundred times over.
Generally, studios are adverse to making films about war in the Middle East. They'd much rather make a film with a superhero or an alien or a robot.
I am not saying that I won't do big commercial films.
There are a lot of films that come out for kids, and the parents have to suffer through it.
To get noticed, I had to take my films in a space which was much more democratic in terms of cinema - the international film festivals.
So there was always a stunt coordinator on those films that was from Stunts Unlimited and I was just one of the young warriors from Stunts Unlimited that got to be a part of it because it was a big show and they needed a lot of guys.
I am my biggest critic. Even in films where people said they liked me, I have disliked myself.
The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same.
