Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius.
It's incredible that they censor films. It's sad.
My mother never saw any of my films until she was in her late 80s, and that was 'Music of the Heart' with Meryl Streep.
I've always wanted to do a horror film. I don't know if my agent will be happy I said that when I get sent some crap horror films, but I'd like to do a good one, like 'It Follows,' or 'The Babadook.'
There are many critics who invite me on their show, and I have told them that when my film releases, you will give it one-and-a-half star rating. That's fine. There's no issue because stars will matter when I'm planning to open a five star hotel. When I'm making films, I don't need stars.
I think the point of art is to be controversial in a lot of ways. It's to cause conversations, and it's to get people excited about and talking about the things that the films are about.
I have an older brother and sister, and I'm definitely ahead of my years in terms of sci-fi and films. My brother is a massive sci-fi fan, and the Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver era... I was involved and interested.
Coming out of the '60s and the Vietnam War in America, it was commonplace for people to make films that had relevance to them. And since the '70s, cinema has gone almost entirely in the direction of spectacle and escapism and superhero films.
'The Xpose' was just an experiment, a small step into Bollywood. It wasn't my acting debut, as reported in Mumbai. I've done a couple of Punjabi films.
I was in 'Cliffhanger' years ago, so I'm a massive fan of the big event movies - the good ones - but there's a lot of crap that's made in between the good ones. It's just the superhuman films that I can't get my head around. I guess if you're a fan of them, then you love them.
I am not a bloody ghoda running a race that you give me a tag. I am competitive, and the reason for that is that I want to do the best films.
A lot of these types of films - the vigilante or revenge drama - were so popular in the '70s because there was a feeling in the culture of loss of control.
My folks were busy. My dad was a teacher, and it was during the Second World War, and my mother was working. So I got my stories from films and books. I read a lot, and I love to read to this day.
Television is a big platform for actors, and so many actors have made it to films from there. And for me, too, it has been a great transition from the small screen to the big screen.
Free time keeps me going. It's just something that's always been a part of my life. I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.
I now have two different audiences. There's the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.
I think one thing that makes me delay projects more than other people is, I see this silver lining in a turn-down. Maybe if I just wrote a script and then pounded my head against all the doors, I would be shooting more films.
Event cinema is what it is, and I understand why it's successful. It started with things like 'Jaws,' which are extraordinary movies. But what we've lost are great character films which are beautifully directed and had great movie stars in them. Films that were about something rather than about spectacle.
I haven't got an opportunity to experiment with the dimensions of my moustache much. But yes, if the role demands, I'm ready to shave it off. I feel it's good to have moustaches for South films, but I'd love to remove my moustache; why not?
My interest in Virtual Reality (VR) films began for me when I began a fellowship with MIT's Open Documentary Lab. It was a profound experience to be on MIT's campus one day a week and to enter a new world of storytelling where breaking convention and traditional methods were expected. This was deeply challenging and inspiring.
Yes, films need to make their money back - it's an expensive business, and people need to be paid for what's involved - but just because you can, it doesn't mean you should.
I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.
A big blockbuster like 'Kick' expands the audience for my films and makes it easier to promote them.
I like living at home: I've been making films since I was 12, when I played Sam in 'Love Actually', and if you spend as much time away on set as I have done, you get your independence young, so it's nice to come back home.
I think invariably when you are dealing with relationships, the films really center on that, and the plot is really born out of that. That's the most core part of a relationship: intimacy, I think, whether it's expressed or not.
Everybody knows about Peter Jackson, 'The Hobbit' movies and 'The Lord of the Rings' films being made in New Zealand, and to actually have been part of it for such a long period, to live there and to have friends that I will have for life because of that experience, is an amazing thing.
Indigenous people in films, it's all, like, nose flutes and panpipes and, you know, people talking to ghosts... which I hate.
For my own films, I would like to see 'Bullet in the Head' remastered. The original cut was actually almost three hours.
Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?
The scene of independent cinema is already a large scene in America, and not in a negative way, but it's cluttered. It's very populated with just American films, so the room left for foreign movies is not extremely vast. The American public also does not really read. They don't read subtitles. But we're like that in Canada, too.
There's something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. It's a reflection as opposed to an interpretation.
I think it's unfair for people to decide what my strength is after just three films.
Robert de Niro has always been fascinating to me. And if John Cazale were still alive, that would be a man I'd love to work with. I'm a big fan of Paul Thomas Anderson's films - I would be honored to work with him. I think he's a brilliant director, and he gets such compelling stories out of his actors and out of his crew.
In 2008, A.J. Schnack recruited Thom Powers to start the Cinema Eye Honors to recognize the artistry and craft that go into making documentary films.
I don't hate L.A., but I'm nervous about becoming one of those people who has a ferocious interest in how films did at the box office that weekend and, you know, would want to meet for egg-white omelets in the morning.
Sometimes we make films just for our people, and it doesn't reach to anyone.