I've always looked at filmmaking as a lifestyle. There is no decision of when you go to work. It's a way of life: you're thinking about scripts; you see things and think, 'That could be interesting'... I don't think about my work as, 'Today I'll work on this, this and that.' It just comes to me.
Almost anything can be justified as a style of filmmaking if it works.
'Jurassic Park' was able to get away with big, dynamic filmmaking that might be out of place in another kind of story.
I was going to design sports cars, but my father came to my college to visit me. At the time he was making a picture in Sweden and he took me there with him. I got to see Ingmar Bergman's company and I thought, 'Gee, filmmaking is a lot more fun than sports cars,' so I decided to follow him and go into acting.
I feel like I'm still learning a lot. I think there's a tendency for people who are just doing their first couple of films that I see now where they seem to be really resentful of the technical limitations that come along with filmmaking.
I'm drawn to filmmaking that can transport me. Film can immerse you, put you there.
The great thing about 'Fargo' is that it's a more objective style of filmmaking: the camera moves in very classical ways, and the most interesting things normally are the characters.
After working for a while, I realized that acting was only satisfying about 30 percent of what interested me about the filmmaking process. Somewhere around age seventeen, I started to realize that if I'm very particular about the people I work with, then I can have the best sort of master class possible.
I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.
I want to try and be as involved in the art of filmmaking as possible. I feel that the only way to really do that is to take on as many roles as possible, whether it be as an actor, an editor, a director, a cinematographer.
I mean, '8½' to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act of filmmaking and creativity.
Telling Alan Turing's story in a two-hour film was a tremendous challenge. It felt in some small way like our filmmaking version of breaking the enigma code.
Here's the thing that people don't understand: I don't really care. I've never been a careerist. It's not a strategy. I react to certain characters and story lines and specific mode of filmmaking.
I think naturally I'm a very visual kind of person. If I wasn't in filmmaking, I'd be in something related to visuals. And I used to actually work as a visual-effects artist.
I think that Christians who have an interest in filmmaking need to deepen their love for cinema. To be honest, that's what I think has been missing historically from the Christians who want to succeed in the Hollywood industry.
In the last ten years of watching films I have found that some of the foreign films I saw affected me most. One American film that stands out for me for its workmanship and artistry is 'Ratatouille.' It was an astonishing effort in filmmaking.
I like acting, but I like filmmaking better. I went to film school. I want to make films.
I have no schooling in any normal sense but have learned from the best as far as just doing things. I learned filmmaking from loving movies and then just saying, 'OK, let's do it.'
The relationship between art and a job is not quite linear, but I really love any and all manifestations of art, really respect any kind of artistic impulse, whether it's paintings and sculptures or really good filmmaking or music. I really see the relationships between these different mediums as very fluid.
Filmmaking is hard. I mean, it's not that hard, but it is hard to find your way through a system because there's a lot of people, there's money, there's a big machine to kind of make it - and how to find methods and processes that allow it to continue to be a lively process and a creative process.
Directing, editing, and everything about filmmaking has definitely changed me as an actor.
Filmmaking is a real democracy - it's up to the audience to vote with their tickets.
It's so difficult to actually come up with ideas that you really fall in love with, you know? That's the most difficult thing about filmmaking - and that's my main challenge in life.
It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.
