Benicio del Toro. I think he's brilliant, and we like working with guys - or gals - who are very talented. They make us look good.
Believe me, I struggled with the idea of am I using this for a way that benefits me in this film? That was really an issue for me for a long time.
Billy Bob and Fran are very well known actors, but aren't the kind of movie stars in the sense that George Clooney and Brad Pitt are.
Earl and I are part of a new entity, 'Public Interest Pictures,' designed to use filmmaking skills to bring this message to a larger public.
I sought Ben Affleck because I needed an everyman for this role. Ben appeals to men and women. He gives you a sense of intelligence, the notion of a guy who can think on his feet.
The whole thing of this business is to retain your enthusiasm and in a sense retain your innocence and try and practice as much humility as you can.
The script was too disturbing. We showed it to some people in Hollywood who said, This is a bad idea. I can't make this. I'm rich.
The script was a synthesis of making mythology relevant in a modern context, relating quantum physics to Zen Buddhism, investigating your own life.
I've spent a lot of time in LA, so I have a fairly good sense of what that world is, and that group has been supportive of the theater in the past.
I've never presented. The logistics of that is a challenge.
It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.
It was very unusual, because normally the producer requests the test to determine whether they want to hire someone or not. Olivia was concerned about playing a seventeen year old.
I've always wanted to do a Crichton book. I really love his writing.
So our films had a lot more to them than entertainment value, and I'm glad that a lot of people recognize that now. People realize now the value of them as educational.
Soon it's all going to be digital anyway. It's all going to be saved on a little coin somewhere.
Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.
Projects like this don't come along very often and I feel amazingly luck to be a part of it.
Our society gives power to people who are successful. All of a sudden, if you've created something unique and interesting, you're set apart.
After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.
After I had received the Watson Fellowship and had been two years in Indonesia on this traveling fellowship, I stayed to start my own theater company.
Subconsciously suggest to the viewer that he is seeing a fragment of continuing life, not a staged scene with a visible framework.
So the ultimate goal is to incorporate the new imagery coming from these crazed artists into the cohesive, core world of Third Edition.
So the location for this film is the images themselves - what is traditionally called stock and archival images. Then we animated those images.
So when I came to making movies, that's the way I wanted to do it. I didn't kind of wanting to just do one part of the process and leave it at that.
No, we don't have an obsession with kidnapping. We just follow the story wherever it leads us, and if it leads us to kidnapping, well there we are!
Acting is easy. Mainly because we have a lot of roles-and they're like our friends and they want to be in movies, so we put them in.
Art does imitate life, and the Rodney King beating was a real event. It's a part of all our consciousness, and there's no value in ignoring it.
That's how you get a performance - they put trust in you.
You're talking about the outsiders in society and how they deal with it and how they justify what they do. I can relate to that.
You never know when you're going to be considered un-hip... The people that really pass judgment on you really have nothing to do with what you do, usually.
This is good. This is really good. To already have this many people have this much passion about something is more than you could ever hope for.
A lot of people thought my work was very tedious, and it can be if you look at it from that point of view, but I never looked upon it as tedious.
They gave me twice the time and twice the money, so Jeepers 2 was almost like a second chance - the monster movie I wanted to do in the first place.
You can't just sit there and do the lines. You have to do something revealing or unusual.
There was certainly times when I was following him around with a camera where he would get to the point where he was running out of patience for it.
There were IBM logos designed for the film, and there were IBM design consultants working with Kubrick on the layout of the controls and computer screens.
They prepared Superman for a year, and they had the guy flying on a flat board with four wires. What were the challenges? Endless.
There's been a big spur in downtown development with new business, restaurants and a lot of loft buying. The buses run, and there's a subway that runs through downtown.
As we went into production, there was no song for Olivia and no idea where we would put it. It was not even on the production schedule.
All organizations are at least 50 percent waste - waste people, waste effort, waste space, and waste time.
It's just often more interesting to write about one or more people who are being awful to other people because it makes for exciting, dramatic fare.
It's exciting to see a kid at a rehearsal meeting with someone who seems like such an icon.
I told her it was a bigger than life musical, that all the actors were going to be about the same age, late twenties into thirties. It would be a style; a kind of surreal high school.
It's all about the same thing, being able to pull people into a situation where you have a vision, and transport that vision off the page.
Foreseeing the struggle, the French began to construct a chain of forts connecting the St. Lawrence settlements with the Mississippi.
It's the unusual leading man. Most of the Hollywood leading men are powerful and capable and strong, heroes. He has this vulnerability, he's fragile, he struggles to find a way to live from day to day that we can identify with, that we can understand.
It's sad - it's sad for us old enough to remember when directors ruled, and films were substantially better than they are today. But it's hard to argue with those kinds of grosses.
It's really hard to imagine there ever being the kind of impact there was when punk rock happened in the late 70's. I wish there would be one big change like that again, but I don't know if that'll ever happen.
Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.
The minute somebody starts trying to market that stuff, I think it would actually really be a harmful thing for the process of film making.
Then I usually leave the choice of the second assistant director and any other assistant directors to the first assistant director, who will choose because he or she is responsible for the conduct and the efficiency of the second assistant directors.
That led me into the area of doing a movie about sequels and a movie that was a parody of the first picture instead of just a sequel to it.
The audience includes subscribers, so you have to be careful.
It's developing a relationship with actors that makes it work.
No, in fact I am embarrassed to say that I told everyone after the first Jeepers that I would never, ever make a sequel to any of my films.
I still am somewhat guarded with my feelings. A lot of writers find it much easier to express themselves on paper. That hasn't changed.
Is there something to be said for the writings of the Marquis? Is there something to be said for pornography? And is there something to be said against both? I hope our film is balanced and rich enough to encourage debate and discussion.
It used to be that people would try to achieve financial success with their art, to make themselves comfortable, accumulate possessions.
It was good training to think spatially and to think in terms of story boarding and so on. So I was already a filmmaker but I hadn't realized it yet.
There was always an outsider quality to him. I think he must have felt that way somewhat, because his family was unusual and his name was unusual.
The new Kirk Douglas Theater for development of new plays and education in Culver City is an area doing a major redevelopment. We're part of that.
It's not color, it's like pouring 40 tablespoons of sugar water over a roast.
Snow - it is what it is. You just work through it. And you take advantage of it when you have it, make it work for you and for the picture.
Excluding the possibility that a female Scandinavian Olympian was running around outside our house last night, what else might be a possibility?
I'm going to miss the mix of the kids who are 21 and come up here and find themselves with people who are at the peak of their careers.
I'm hands-on in areas where I can make a difference. There's no sense in me standing on set; the director doesn't need me there.
I knew, as opposed to Gods And Monsters, this had to deal with Kinsey's early experiences in childhood and early marriage as they informed who he was.
I made all these films and I had all kinds of great experiences. I worked with the great filmmakers and it was a very exciting life.
I made this movie for $40,000, which was this little black-and-white horror film called Dementia 13, which we made in about nine days.
I'm a big collector of vinyl-I have a record room in my house-and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection.
I'm thinking of remaking Psycho again. Doing a third remake. The idea this time is to really change it - we're talking about doing a Punk rocker setting.
I mean look, the thing about movie making and criticism and producing movies now, everyone compares everything to something else.
I have no interest in directing. I'd be a bad director.
I had to learn to do everything because I couldn't find another kindred soul. Now you see eighty people listed doing the same things I was doing by myself.
I had no training in the theater. I did not study it but just did it.
I never read comics growing up at all. I liked science-fiction, fantasy, and watched a lot of television, but I never read comics.
In England, I'm a horror movie director. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In the US, I'm a bum.
I lived in a small town. It was 2,000 people in Canada. A little river that went through it and we swam in the - you know, there was a lot of water around. Niagara Falls was about four or five miles away.
I'll be going to the granddaddy of the Los Angeles theaters.
If there's anything I hate more than being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
If people take the film and screen it whenever possible for their social and professional networks, we can continue to make a difference. It is one more element we have to use in the ongoing effort to take back our country.
I had a lot of lucky breaks When I got a job that I had no training in; I just had to get good and work very, very hard, learning what I needed.
I love Philip Roth, I love all his stuff.
I'll miss the idea of 400 people coming together for such a short period of time. They arrive and then just start creating theater.
I prefer to work alone and do everything alone, even today.
In next five to 10 years I probably would have done my best work, but I was afraid of having another 10 or 15 years ahead of me and feeling stale, so this was an opportunity to reinvigorate myself.
Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color.
But, I don't know, I really don't spend a lot of time, I think what you've got to do is you think about what you're going to do next.
But I don't have any great secrets for anybody, you know, I really don't. I don't do anything that lots of other people don't do.
But in terms of satire and comedy,our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine.
But, I mean, egotism is not a good quality. It's not something to be admired or even tolerated. It wouldn't be tolerated in a field commander and it shouldn't be tolerated in a movie director.
Because I actually find the next take after they've controlled it a little bit and repressed the laughter is actually a really interesting take, because that's still going on underneath the surface. That struggle to maintain composure becomes part of the joy of the scene.
He's very alive in a scene. He's a very good actor to act with. Even though through most of the picture he's blind, there are many places early in the picture I got to be with him before he was blind. Like convincing him in the office to do the picture.
I do think that we are facing a crisis in our democracy. As true patriots, each and every one of us has to speak up, speak out, and change those in charge. Our democracy depends upon it.
I don't see my career as this steady building to a point, it's just a path that wanders for me to do whatever I'm interested in doing.
I am writing this because I love you, so that sustained within your warming heart our future days remain locked-to this simple message.
I don't want to glorify robbing banks, but I come from a world that shares Willis's view, that banks and so on are the biggest crooks of them all.
The trick is to have my own particular taste and feel for the theater to audiences who have been used to one particular style and taste for nearly 40 years.
The English common law was accepted in all the colonies, but it was modified everywhere by statutes, according to the need of each colony.
The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them.