The stakes are high on every film now because there's the opening weekend. The first week is extremely crucial; increasingly, films are being judged in terms of opening day, opening weekend, then first week. People are going berserk promoting their films.
I'm a big fan of martial arts films, novels and radio programs.
But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you're not snooping into somebody else's lives?
To make films, you have to have something to say. To have something to say, you have to be a student of life. And to be a student of life, you have to be feeding yourself with what life, politics, society, and your family fuels you with.
With journalism, films always have to be to do with some personal statement of your own. As a general rule, I resist that. In the States, a question that kept coming up was this: 'How can you, as a man, talk about three women?'
The problem with big films is they snowball very rapidly and you can never pull back. It's a pipeline that needs to be fed.
The second-grade films - where are they? No more are they made, and yet they were by far the best films for holding hands at, and wasn't this always the main purpose of the cinema?
When I was around 12 or so, I saw 'The Shining.' I just remember that being a turning point for me, where I started to think about the fact that there was a hand behind the film. That it wasn't just this magical story being told - there were actual people crafting these films, and they were works of art.
I think it's a little simplistic to explain a work through the psychology of its author. In other words, that Haneke has emotional problems, so I don't have to take his films seriously. By using this argument, the viewer retreats from the challenges of the film.
All things take time. A lot of my films still run on cable and are in video stores, and there's a whole generation that doesn't know who I am. So, it's a dichotomy. In some people's minds I may never grow up.
Some films clearly seem to divide people. And I do think there's something incredibly exciting about the commonality of us as human beings, which some films are lucky enough to tap into.
I don't like films giving me answers. I like films that are provoking me, that are making me feel not only being in an easy place.
It is always interesting being on films sets - I have done it before with other actor friends - and I just find it fascinating. I just love that collaborative film family that develops around a project.
I've finished 12th standard from Poddar International and enrolled for B.A. in political science in Cambridge University, London. It's a correspondence course, and I'll go to London for my exams once a year. That way, I can devote more time to films.
Even today, my father watches my films only in the theatre with the general public. And he's very tough. His first call will be to the director and the camera man, and only then will he send me a message.
Look at the films of Walt Disney: 'Snow White' came out in February 1938, and I can't think of another film from that year that's watched as much. The same is true of 'Bambi,' 'Dumbo'... even, frankly, 'Toy Story,' which is probably watched more than any other movie of 1995.
I think that, occasionally, fame and popularity can garner more attention for individuals or films. But as a person who believes in my craft, I like the romantic notion that skill and hard work is more important than notoriety.
Some people think that horror films are some sort of second class filmmaking, and the only way to bypass that thinking is being proud of the fact that we do it.
It was never really part of my plan to be in films; it was really sort of a dream.
I grew up within Italian-American neighborhoods, everybody was coming into the house all the time, kids running around, that sort of stuff, so when I finally got into my own area, so to speak, to make films, I still carried on.
I always wanted to work on films, and when I was starting in television in this country, in Great Britain, there really wasn't any film to be made.
If you want to make films, you'll watch Kurosawa. If you want to play a violin, you listen to Seghetti. Same with somebody who has the ambition to play in the NBA. I watch a basketball game; I enjoy it. Somebody who really wants to learn to play is studying whatever is most magnificent that's going on out there.
I used to do films for money earlier. I never knew what perception meant. I didn't give too much attention to scripts. It was either to buy a house or to buy a car. There was a certain frivolity to the way I used to pick up things. I wasn't taking my career seriously.
I live in New York City, the stories of my films take place in New York; I'm a New York filmmaker.
I always wanted to play a boxer because some of my favorite films, as a boy, were those great boxing movies, like 'Raging Bull', 'Rocky', 'The Set Up', 'Fat City and Hard Times'. I just loved those films.
I feel that, in India, we have films that have tackled various issues over the years, but perhaps one of the issues that we've tackled less is the issue of caste-ism. That's an issue we've more or less stayed away from... although we touched on it briefly in some films like 'Lagaan.'
I've done four other films since 'Submarine,' so that's quite cool. It's just good to have people respect your work; I've never had that before. Yeah, my life has changed crazy. I'm a kid from a small town in south Wales, I play my Xbox usually and all that sort of stuff, and it's a whole new world.
Because I was a kid from north of England, the only films I had access to was not alternative cinema, which in those days would be foreign cinema; I would be looking at all the Hollywood movies that arrived at my High Street.
In between films I like to travel and hope to visit every continent before I become a mother.
My favorite films, I would put my answering machine up to the television set and hit record. I'd tape my favorite movies and then I could go back and listen to them again. I only had the soundtrack, I didn't have the visuals. But I think it made me really pay attention to the soundtracks.
I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.
As for 'Independence Day,' we never intended to do any films in that series beyond the first one.
I think when I was younger, I used to sort of long to be a part of films that were really gritty and hardcore in a way.
'Menace II Society' itself was a groundbreaking film. It's definitely going to go in the vaults of classics in all of cinema. The Hughes Brothers created an incredible project. Just gave the world something a little different than what we had seen in previous films in that same genre.
Steven Spielberg had a tremendous influence on me through his early stuff. 'E.T.', 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' - 'Jaws,' I think, is one of the most beautifully directed films ever.
I like to keep my budgets at a certain price when I work for someone else, and even more so now that I'm working for myself, and use new technologies to deliver films that look like they have high production levels.
