I also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there's so much in those films and I don't care if it's stereotyped.
You gain and lose different things in different mediums or different sectors of different mediums. There are liberties you get on tiny indie films in terms of not having to be designed toward a marketing demographic.
I find it quite difficult on studio films because there are so many different executives and things like that that you have to go through, so very often getting that definitive opinion is actually quite difficult.
We didn't really have television when I was a kid. Around 30, I discovered films and started systematically catching up. I collect interesting documentaries and films, and watch a few nights a week.
I don't have an anti-Hollywood feeling. It's just I'm a New Zealander. I was born in New Zealand, and it's where my house is, and my family goes to school there. My interest is to remain in my homeland and make films. I don't really want to relocate myself to other countries in the world to work.
Where I come from, it's a little bit like England. We start from the theater, and we do films a bit on our free time. The history of making films in Scandinavia is so old, it's like the oldest. The Nordic film industry started before Hollywood in Stockholm in Copenhagen.
I am not interested in churning out a certain number of films every year. For me, it's about the quality of work. I think it's about following your instincts and doing a film for the right reason.
I find the most interesting and most daring scripts tend to be for independent films.
Yeah, I've played a lot of instruments, and I played in a lot of bands growing up, and I've even had to play music in a lot of films that I've done.
A lot of the films now are more focused on the visuals than on the actors. I think all directors should go to drama school.
I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don't work at all, but I'll watch them if they're on. Like 'The Game.'
I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn't do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.
I think that short films often contain an originality, a creative freedom, an energy and an invention that is inspiring and entertaining. I think they are, as Shakespeare put it, a good deed in a naughty world.
Sci-fi films are the epic films of the day because we can no longer put 10,000 extras in the scene - but we can draw thousands of aliens with computers.
If people ever stop making films about India, I'd never work again.
Yes, I would love to play one of the leads in one these movies and have all those challenges and deal with all those complications, but the business being what it is, there is a slot for me in these kinds of films, so I enjoy them, and I enjoy the people that I work with.
In America, they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent.
I've never had any delusions about being a leading man, and it's not sour grapes to say that in the best films that I've always enjoyed, the cliched leading man type isn't a part of the picture.
I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.
The problem is, with a lot of children's films, they are very commercial.
Right now, I love the fact that I have so many opportunities, but I know this privileged position cannot last. That doesn't mean that I'll stop working. I picture myself as an old actress doing cameos in films with people saying: 'Isn't that that Bening woman?'
A lot of films need planning in order to survive at all. It's part of the dog and pony show.
The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.
I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors.
You go back to those films of the '40s and '50s and hear the dialogue, the way the people played off each other - the wordplay. I think we've really lost that in movies.
The film industry needs to confront the physical footprint of the way films get made.
I kind of worry about that a little bit - we lost our film culture for 30 years because the Americans came in and bought up all the cinema chains and wouldn't show any Australian films.
Acting in films hasn't changed me. I feel exactly the same.
I love small films, and I love films being seen in a theater. I love film, and unfortunately, that's being phased out.
I am really excited about my next films, as I am working with big names like Salman and Ranbir.
Now it really is, believe it or not, 90% of the films are green lit, not by the studio heads, but by the marketing department.
I really want to be associated with great projects and character driven projects and films. I have to feed my soul, and keep feeling like an artist and keep being challenged.
I spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them.
When I was a kid, which was just after Edison invented moving pictures, there were films that involved aliens coming to Earth for bad purposes.
They're pretty extreme, but I loved the two 'Human Centipede' films from Tom Six. Those movies are fun because they're well-made. They're crazy and psychotic and perverted and twisted, but they're really well-made.
If Martin Scorsese calls, I am available. And then there the ones, well, you can just run down the list - any of those Oscar-nominated films, they have amazing directors across the board.
