There are a lot of films that are drug dramas, and we didn't want to tell Scarface again.
Rabid fans were literally jumping into the camera.
I never do, I don't even go to the retrospectives.
It's a very slow process - two steps forward, one step back - but I'm inching in the right direction.
Other kinds of movie stars, it's a different thing, they bring their persona to the part and that's what people like to see, and they are not really transforming in terms of their character.
Poor human reason, when it trusts in itself, substitutes the strangest absurdities for the highest divine concepts.
With Bound, we wanted to pull at conventions, because you begin to wonder, Why do these stereotypes exist? Where do they come from? You use that as the subtext.
That's why I'm really trying to produce my own stuff. This film was so good, because I produced it myself, and developed it, and made it with New Line, which is a smaller studio, so I was in control of a lot of stuff that I wasn't in control of for my other films.
And I liked this extreme character of de Sade.
We've been remarkably lucky in that we've been free to make the movies we've wanted to make the way we've wanted to make them. They've all been made for a price.
When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.
Your best protection is to have an established agent make the contact.
If I could go back I might change Geronimo a bit. If I do, it will be made a longer version.
We've had no problems with the actors, but we keep a really loose set.
The danger is not so much in the economic structure of a society but in its intellectual structure.
You're doing it to make the character as specific as possible, so that it's a specific individual that you're talking about, not that whole class of people.
It's more like can I build a group of characters and can I tell some universal truths that feel real and aren't formulaic in the spirit of filmmakers gone by who've told American stories that were personal and universal as well.
I think we both have some darkness in us. But when we are together, we tend to concentrate more on the light.
I shot a lot of close-ups on this movie 'cause there's like a dual mystery, she's searching through her haunted past to find some truth and she's also following an external mystery where she comes to think she might be the killer.
Some people come out going, I don't get it. And I don't quite know what they're trying to get, what they're struggling for. We have had the reaction where people leave the movie sort of uncomfortable and befuddled. Although that wasn't our intention.
Whereas my producer literally worked on this thing for 10 years and because I gave that presenter credit to David Lynch, she to this day never gets credit. It really kills me.
Somebody once said, you have to wait 20 years before you can tell if a movie's any good or not so that's probably true.
It's finding those nonsensical pieces of conversation that we all do all the time. We do all the time. When we're talking on the telephone, there are arguments with people who agree when they both think that they disagree.
While that wasn't first and foremost in my mind, you can't get into this without being struck, on one side, by how far we've come, and then the other side, by how little things have changed.
It's a big part of what we do - we test our movies extensively. I'm always there myself. It's sometimes difficult to sit through, especially if it's a version of the movie that's not working particularly well.
It just seemed to me to be a great story, set back in its time but something that seemed to have relevance for our time. Now that the film is coming out, it looks like we're back in another time where repression of expression is all the rage.
I always admired Stanley Kubrick for the fact that he managed to beat the system somehow. I think he kind of had it all figured out.
I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
It is up to us to produce better-quality movies.
Nine out of 10 times these guys will hit it-they'll be on something incredibly funny, but one out of 10, two out of 10, they'll fall flat on their faces. That's what makes them great actors: they take those chances, they don't play it safe.
It's a funny thing because you look at the careers of other filmmakers, and you see them sort of slow down, and you realize, maybe this becomes harder to do as you get older. That's sort of a cautionary thing. I hope it doesn't happen to me.
I think the other misconceptions when the film came out, he was very upset that it was so widely released and so widely seen. And neither one of us - well, I think I had hopes it would be, 'cause I really did think it was something special.
I think she said I should seek help. Something like that, but it was in much cruder terms. And that I had a fascination with things coming out of people's mouths.
I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors.
There are a lot of laughs in this movie, but it's not just about the laughs. It's really about the story, about a guy who finds his soul and realizes what's truly important.
Nowadays they either want to move the film to Canada or in some cases they go to Prague or Romania or they want to keep 'em down in L.A.
The question is: Where would it get you if something that's a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn't get you anywhere.
Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding.
I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.
I'll talk about these things, but it's just, you know, you only get so much time and I'm much more interested in what I'm going to be doing next year than in something I did 10 years ago.
It'll be all of our efforts together. It won't won't ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it's going to be the sum total of the group.
Actually, I loved Chucky. It's one of the strangest movies I've ever seen.
It is the idea that it's a movie in a movie. So I did it.
It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.
The thing about Brando was that I'd make these directions, and he'd walk away. He'd heard enough... to get the machine going.
You see a moral in them? Do we have morals?
I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn't know would never get financing.
I made three films with Douglas, two with Charles Boyer.
You've got to keep fighting - you've got to risk your life every six months to stay alive.
Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.
Well, we're in show business, and I have been making a living in this business a long time and inevitably it means taking what it is that you've done and hopefully you're showing it to a lot of people who like it.
I take them seriously but I try not to read them. I take them personally, that's why I don't read them. I think people are lying when they say they don't care, that's not true. I take them personally.
These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.
In each colony in 1750 were to be found two sets of governing organizations, - the local and the general.
The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.
There's a monster outside my room, can I have a glass of water?
Yes, but Hollywood is the strangest place in that they'll torpedo their own film to prove an emotional point.
More emphasis was thus thrown upon the local governments than in England.
These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable.
I thought Godzilla was a mess, the monster had no character and the humans didn't either. They forgot to make the movie that went along with all these wonderful effects.
And Kinsey thought that anybody who defined themselves based on their sexual acts was limiting themselves.
The simple answer is I'd just be a guy trying to feed my family, like everybody else. The complicated answer is, I think I'd be in some sort of military or government world of some sort.
I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying.
It's almost like a genre rule: Don't Open The Box.
In other countries, it's a common thing to have outcast children running around the streets in packs, and I don't think we're so far away from it here.
Our relationship was cursed by the fact that we agreed on everything.
Maybe there should be less of a mystique around making movies. I just don't think that there's any real mystery there.
Nowadays the audience has changed. No one can anticipate the audience.
That's what I think musicals will come to. No backstage stories, nothing of that sort.
We shot that in all the real places where Van Gogh worked.
I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don't know they're in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate.
I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.
If you ask any person on this crew what they think of Hugh Jackman they'll admit they've never seen anything like it. I'll give him an emotional note and he'll hit it every time.
One of the people that became a major source was Clarence Tripp who worked with Kinsey.
Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.
The guy that made me wanna make movies... and this is off the wall-is a guy named Michael Pal, the British director.
In Beverly Hills... they don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
We started out thinking of this as a comic book. We filled notebook after notebook with ideas. That's where the script came from.
When we do a movie with the studios, they wouldn't be asking us to do it, I don't think, if it was a movie they wanted to get into themselves. What you see is what you get with us, so they let us do what we want to do.
When we did Wayne's World, it was 14 million dollars and they didn't bug us too much because they just thought it was some little movie that nobody was ever going to see. We showed them.
What's not perceived to be an A movie anymore, is often subject matter that would have been thought of as a B movie many years ago.
Usually, I don't want to sit down and listen to the director gas on about his movie. I just can't actually imagine myself sitting down and having that much to say.
Working with Christopher, he convinced me he could fly, and he's convinced me he's going to walk again.
We feel that Grendel is very, very potent as to where we are today, which may not be any different than where we were in the 10th Century.
With The Omen, I really felt I wasn't in control. It was panic.
Wales is an old land with wounds that weep in hills. They wept before in the bodies of men and in the hearts of women and time will never heal them.
When it was narrowed down to eight names and I was called down for an interview, then it became more serious. Things went very fast.
Like a Pearl Harbor, they're going into their opening weekend knowing that they spent $110 million making this movie. That pressure must be enormous.
Make every decision as if you owned the whole company.
'm a general, I do something. I go out and fight wars and win them.
Los Angeles has always been on the table with us.
Many ideas are good for a limited time - not forever.
Many times I felt like I'd do better than what the director did, but some of them got a little discouraged because they didn't have full charge of making the film, and sometimes there'd be battles of egos.
So I told Robert from the start that if we couldn't get Charles and Max to take part, but especially Charles, that I didn't want to make the film. So would he call his mother and talk to Charles and see if Charles would at all be interested.
So I was saving up my money and bought a Super 8 camera, projector, some editing equipment, a bunch of film stock, and moved to Austin.
Olivia Newton-John was our first choice to play Sandy, but she was nervous about acting, whether she would feel comfortable with us and could pull it off at all.
Sitting in this chair, my recommendation would carry too much weight.
Most people in big companies are administered, not led. They are treated as personnel, not people.
Me and Johnny Rotten have been talking about doing a movie of his book, No Irish, No Dogs, No Blacks. We have a script, so hopefully that's going to happen at some point in our careers.