Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
With a lot of films, people are sitting on the outside looking in, but I want the audience to get a bit more intimately involved with what's going on, so that they maybe can experience it a little bit more intensely.
Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.
I've done almost 20 films and I still worry about not finding the next one.
A lot of people want to make films and do photography and things, but I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing.
Our cinema has evolved in last 60 years because we have made people happy through our films. The main purpose of our storyline is to spread happiness. Our cinema has an emotional connect.
I think my films are always political, even if I don't put explicitly political things in them.
I'm glad movies aren't going to please everybody, they can't. But what they have to be is recognisable. I don't equate myself with a master painter, but I think you can recognise my films.
You as an audience can look at these things as films, but I remember them as social experiences.
My father did 90-plus films. He was Spartacus!
I've heard about brothers making films, but I've never heard about whole families making films like this. We didn't intend to do it; it wasn't something that we planned - it just gradually happened.
It's funny: I've been very successful and done a lot of films, and I don't really have an agent - I don't really pursue jobs, I let people come to me.
Doing that, then doing a lot of theater, which I love. Doing guest stars, did two independent films that are going around to all these festivals. Both of them are going to be at the Lake Tahoe Film Festival.
Growing up the son of a director has made me very aware of the various turns that a directing career can take. Sometimes your films turn out exactly as you want. Sometimes they don't. I spent a lot of my childhood on sets. I think as a joke, my father gave me a line of dialogue in each of his films during the worst moments of my puberty.
In the future, I would like to do more films with contemporary themes. Perhaps comedy, which is something I have done in theater but not in cinema.
There's something so glorious in giving control to the world. I think that's what I'm trying to do in my films - control the world but also let it be chaotic, let there be life.
Then all of a sudden, Quentin Tarantino comes along and puts a song from 40 years ago in one of his films and they've suddenly discovered you. That was a real gift that Quentin gave me.
We've evolved from sitting back on our tripods and shooting wildlife films like they have been shot historically, which doesn't work for us.
Well I think always, when you remake films, I always think the first one is most original, authentic.
I smuggled the camera, it was no problem to smuggle the camera there. And I took 60 photos, two films, during the time when there was no one in the control room, in the building.
Every Pixar film, when we start developing the story, it takes about four years to make one of our films.
I think a lot of the most interesting work in art and in films are often kind of polarized opinions and affect people in very different ways, which may be less successful commercially, but they elicit a dialogue that's quite interesting.
I've never even watched one of my films since they're completed.
There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.
Not all my work features black actors. I mean, it's funny: someone was reading back to me all the languages that have appeared in my films, whether they were shorts or features. They span Arabic, French, Mandarin, Cantonese - all kinds of languages. I think it's really cool.
My films do have characters who have trouble escaping the world around them.
I choose films for their artistic value. I don't need a mansion or a Jaguar. When I leave this Earth, I won't take any money with me. All I will leave behind will be my art.
I don't want to come and conquer American films or the American market. I just want to do movies that I care about, stories that I like.
I'm a big kid, I'm a kid at heart, so I still love the classic family films, such as the great Warner Bros film 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' - not the remake, but the original. It's still one of the best movies, hands down, ever made, and of course that goes back to the ingenuity of the characters and the storyline.
Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important.
I've always loved... actually I didn't always love horror films. I started out and I only liked comedies and dramas.
You always want your films to go as far as they can.
I've obviously always been aware of actor-oriented films, being an actor. Altman and Cassavetes were really strong. And then I realized their structures were quite fascinating, too.
I'm not sure what my material would have been if I'd have started earlier. I probably would have started with 'Damsels in Distress' kinds of films because that's the kind of comedy I was writing in college. So I didn't really have any life experience to work off of.
So it's kind of nervous to be in this situation, but at the same time you look at all those actors and the work that they've done, I've been in bigger films than all of them and still kept my integrity and still kept my respect.
A lot of feature films do two pages a day.
