Getting sequestered and not really knowing what to do with your time and then discovering, 'Oh, I can watch a bunch of horror movies' has probably played out in a lot of people's discovery of horror.
I think there's a character one has if you're a chief executive officer. Movies would suggest you're a bad person - if you're wealthy, if you've done well, oh, you must be bad. And frankly, winning the lottery doesn't change who you are; you're the same person inside. And I'm the same person I was as an 18-year-old who fell in love with Ann.
Most big popcorn movies are 'bad guy does something to good guy, good guy gets revenge on bad guy, sets the world right, and moves on.' And 'Ender's Game' is just not that simple, so it's an exciting challenge. It's a little terrifying, and let's see how audiences respond.
Often, in the movie business, they need somebody who will garner box office because they need to pay for the movie. So the people who are in movies that make a lot of money are the people who most often get cast in studio pictures. In my career, I've never been a box office name.
Movies are made in the scriptwriting process and prepping and preparations for the shooting process.
The crazy thing about independent filmmaking is that you're so judged on your first film. It almost needs to be one of those groundbreaking 'I've-never-seen-that-before'-type movies.
Only directors like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who make period films, have songs in their movies that facilitate the inclusion of classical dance forms. No one else is concentrating on making pure classical numbers.
I don't see many explosions or ten-car crashes in the course of my life, so I don't put them into my movies. I would love to live in a society where 'My Dinner with Andre' made $100,000,000. Then I would be in the mainstream. I could do that stuff easier than I could do 'Meatballs.'
I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.
As kids, we did see the Disney movies and the kids' adventure stories of the day.
Most movies suck, even the independent ones. Hollywood is like baseball: Hit three good ones out of 10 and you're a Hall of Famer.
I went to film school, trained as a director, have made a lot of movies, and taken a lot of photographs, so I tend to envision things spatially. As I'm working, I need to have a map of the space. I need to know what's happening in all corners simultaneously.
The hardest part about making movies is staying the exact same weight every day and looking the same.
It seems that we're heading toward the day that films will be released in all platforms simultaneously, albeit with a cost premium to see it at home. But I hope that theater-going doesn't end - I think that watching movies on the big screen with an audience is still the best format and also an important one for society.
I would really love to do the score for movies. Pick the music and work with composers. I don't know if I'd be any good at it, but I love music.
I think there's still an appetite among a certain audience to see intelligent movies that have real emotion in them.
Movies are more than a commodity. Movies are to our civilization what dreams and ideals are to individual lives: They express the mystery and help define the nature of who we are and what we are becoming.
Growing up, I always loved Disney movies, but the first movie I remember seeing is 'Sleepers,' so I wasn't really taken to children's movies.
I never think of myself as lumbering, but I guess I am. I forget how huge I am sometimes. I've seen movies where I'm with a group of people, and I'm like, 'God, I'm just so gargantuanly bigger than anyone else there.'
People always say, 'Why don't you make more movies like 'Heathers'?' And I say, 'I've been trying for 20 years.'
People used to be funny about approaching me, but now they seem to think I'm as sane as anyone who's done what I've done in movies can be.
Obviously I love 'The Godfather' movies. I think they're phenomenal.
Movies are too literal.
'La La Land' is about the city I live in. It's about the music that I grew up playing; it's about movies that I grew up watching. Even the big spectacle of the movie feels private to me in that way.
I came from doing Wushu and other martial arts, and then I got into movies, and I had to learn that as well - the language of martial arts movie fighting. It's a different thing; it's a different kind of logic.
Movies that are subtitled don't usually do as well in American theatres.
I'd love to work with Tarantino, Scorsese, Sofia Coppola - all of them! I love thrillers and action movies. I love good horror films. I watched them so much when I was younger that I find it impossible to get scared.
There's only a certain number of movies I'm going to get made, and it's important to me that they each be original somehow.
What always leads me in terms of my movies are characters.
Sometimes I have little movies that I've made that I wish would be seen by a larger audience. I have a horror movie called 'Sensored' which I'm very creepy and disgusting in, and then I have a family drama called 'The Legends of Nethiah' which has a science-fiction B-story.
I don't go out a lot, as I like to stay in. I often go for dinners with my girlfriend, and I love to see movies at the cinema, but I don't understand them.
If I wanted to work financially, I would have made a series of different choices. I do get offered lots of movies which you could make a lot of money out of. And I always say, 'Why would I do that, when someone else could do it much better than me? Why would I want to do an action picture? Why?'
I like movies about failing.
We are suffering from a glut of too many 3-D movies and not enough screens.
I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?
Sometimes I do movies that aren't any good, or sometimes I might not be any good in them, or sometimes they don't do very well.
