In a sense, 'Schmidt' is the most Omaha of my films. But have I gotten it right? I'm not sure. Did Fellini get Rome right? Did Ozu get Tokyo right?
I've always been into visual effects. It was something I took keen interest in before films happened. Ironically, I am a part of 'Raaz 3,' a film that is shot entirely on 3D. It has encouraged me to pursue my dream. Hopefully, if time permits, I will travel to the United States and attend a crash course in visual graphics and animation.
I see film roles as lovely presents that come along now and again. I feel really lucky and say thank you very much. And if they fly me to L.A., I think, 'God, I must really be doing well.' I've worked with De Niro and Brando and Pacino, and that's made me feel very lucky. But the films have never meant a lot to me.
I'm baffled when young actors aren't familiar with current film, television and theater, or aren't interested in older films or plays and the history of the craft in general. If you don't know what's out there, and what came before, then how can you picture yourself working, and how can anyone else?
You know, the blond guy plays the good guy and I play the bad part, the bad guys. Which is a lot of fun. Playing the bad guy is great. And it's the whole British thing. You know, in so many films the bad guy is British. Gary Oldman makes a living doing that.
I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books.
I am a big fan of the old Howard Hawks films from the 30s and 40s, I was a big Hepburn and Tracey fan for a while and Woody Allen films that are a very different kind of romantic comedy.
I don't shoot two films at the same time. I finish one character and get into another character because I change my look for every film. It's difficult, but I enjoy doing that.
I will always come back to do Australian films. I think it matters. I think we can make films that people go and see. And I don't think it's too much to ask that films in this country make a profit and that we embrace them.
If only every man who sees my films did not get the impression he can make love to me, I would be a lot happier.
The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern.
There's such good writing now on television and I don't see a lot of great writing on films sadly.
I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.
Films work due to scripts, characters, and what you see on screen.
After the Revolution in '49, all the films were propaganda. They serviced the government and carried the message that the government wants to relay to the people. But I think, in the last 10 years, because the film market is opening and there's an expansion of all the cinemas in China, it's now a lot like Hollywood productions.
After I learn more English, I'll work hard and make more films.
This is really a difficult time to be in films.
I'm only interested in being a good actor and in being remembered for my best films, not for the way I look. But it seems inevitable in this line of work that I have to care about the way I look without getting obsessed about it.
Most films, it doesn't matter if you see them or not.
I don't see a full-fledged career in Hollywood. I am happy with the cameos. Even Tom Cruise will only do special appearances in our films; he wouldn't do a full hero movie. But it's good to act in different cinema.
Mick Jagger has produced some great films and brought us stories about the music industry that have changed the way we think about how music is made. I never thought I would actually call him my boss, let alone meet Mick Jagger or have any reason to say my name in the same sentence as his.
I had developed this habit of writing scenarios as a hobby. I would find out which stories had been sold to be made into films and I would write my own treatment and then compare it.
My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'
I think of the 'Hobbit' films as being films for the family.
I don't particularly enjoy watching films in 3D because I think that a well-shot and well-projected film has a very three-dimensional quality to it, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the technology.
Films have never shown the kind of relationship that can exist between two women.
One of the tricky things about sort of larger, comic-book action movies is that the scale is so big that they have to save the world at the end of every movie, and so at the end of each of the films, either Chicago or New York end up getting obliterated.
We're used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device. Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there's really only one note that you get, and that's clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They'll sacrifice the joke. They'll sacrifice the moment, or the romance.
I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.
In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 'The Passion of Joan of Arc,' one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.
I've been doing second unit for years, which is sort of like directing mini movies. Now that I'm directing entire films, it's really just more of everything. There are a lot more questions that need answers.
I want to direct films, because I am a painter and a sculptor and I've done a lot of writing.
One thing I know is that I don't want to be a director for hire, making genre films.
It was no accident that I made 'Hoop Dreams' because it concerned a sport that I loved and hoped would be my dream, however far-fetched that turned out to be. Because of the success of that film, Hollywood pigeonholed me as a sports biopic guy, which led to 'Prefontaine' and two cable sports films.
Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I'm watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they're painted, could be art. With music, you're a little bit limited, of course, because it's only audio.
'Sunset Boulevard' - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties.
