Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you've all got laptops, so you're all filmmakers.
My early films look terrible! I didn't know what I was doing. I learned when I was doing it. I never went to film school.
Because of the cumbersome nature of filmmaking, it's only recently that it has become available to the masses, with digital equipment and laptop computers. You can now actually make a pretty serviceable movie for very little money by yourself.
I started movies in 1980. I don't think anything's changed for the best. When it comes down to certain technologies and certain things that have afforded more people to maybe have a shot at making a movie or something like that, that's good. But you also end up with 50,000 times the amount of bad movies, because now anybody can make a bad movie.
There's no excuse not to make films on weekends with friends.
My filmmaking background has really just been making movies with my friends since I was 12 years old. That's how I feel I learned how to tell a story visually, by just going out with a video camera and making movies with my friends and family.
This is an age where you could put anything on YouTube; people can make films on their own.
When I put that first Vine out, I was just doing it for fun; there was no wanting to become an artist.
Dreamland Studios then was my bedroom at my parents' house, mostly [starring] people who were in my high school. They look straight at the camera; they're uncomfortable doing it. So, are [early movies] good? No.
The first few films I made didn't look good at all, and I wasn't trying to make them look good. People dig 'em because they like the content.
My friends and I started making films when I was still in kindergarten.
I was turning up at sets where inexperienced people were making these badly written films - but they were doing it; that was the point. They were getting their films out there. And they were paying me, so they obviously had access to money. I just thought, 'I can make something better than this.'
Malaysian Tamil movies are amateurish, with songs picked up from our old Tamil movies and inserted in between.
You see a kid making a film on a cell phone. He doesn't know what he's doing either. But it comes out kind of good.
Where I come from, it's a little bit like England. We start from the theater, and we do films a bit on our free time. The history of making films in Scandinavia is so old, it's like the oldest. The Nordic film industry started before Hollywood in Stockholm in Copenhagen.
When you start out as a filmmaker, you do parodies, because you can't really compete on a studio level.
When I was fifteen years old, my dad won a video camera in a corporate golf tournament. I snatched it from his closet and began filming skateboard videos with my friends.
Filmmakers, they tell me they want to make movies. I say, 'Good, go out, buy a $500 camera, get some friends and make a movie. Don't go to Hollywood. Stay wherever you are.'
What's very funny is when you see amateurs filming something, they do some things no professionals would dare to do. They instinctively do things that are very avant-garde and useful.
I don't have a typical filmmaker background. I didn't grow up with a super eight camera or a video camera. I didn't start cutting movies when I was four or five.
All my brother Eliot and I did as kids was film sketches.
I ended up getting to do a lot of student films - no budget: somebody just wrangled up a camera and went to shoot stuff - and it was fun. It was great.
It's called 'Fight Valley,' and it's my first feature film. I just dove in and did the best I could. I don't think I'm gonna win any Academy Awards on this one. I had fun with it and hopefully will get more opportunities like that. It's about two sisters, one poor and one rich, and one goes into underground fighting.
Look, people have been filming fights since the beginning of time.
I've written tons of scripts, and when I wrote 'The New Girl in Town,' I read it to my parents, and they suggested I make a movie out of it. I got a few friends together, and I shot the movie in one weekend, and then my mom and I edited it.
