I live in New York City, the stories of my films take place in New York; I'm a New York filmmaker.
We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls.
Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.
Sometimes there's something that a writer doesn't see or a producer doesn't see when he's looking at a shot.
I was a big fan of Joe's film, Narc, so when you hear there's a script coming over from Joe Carnahan, you know it's going to be interesting because he has such a fresh voice.
You ought to have a perspective when you're making a film.
I love working with women - I love women - and we need more women directors. We need more feminine sensibilities in movies.
Cinemascope has become synonymous with 'epic,' and absolutely if you're shooting armies and certain kinds of vast landscapes, you do want that panoramic canvas to work on. But if you look at art history there's not a whole lot of epic paintings that are in that aspect ratio.
A book and a movie are different animals. You need a cinematic perspective to be involved in the motion pictures. And this is something I lack.
I had grown up thinking of movies as something to eat popcorn with. Bergman and the other European directors were the first ones to open my eyes to film as art.
[The director] has to, I feel, be one step back, not only from cinema, but also from politics and all these issues in order to tell and depict the situation that spreads to people.
I would recommend that any writer get off their ass at least once and just try it. Directing is a completely different set of muscles. It also affects your writing because, once you start directing, you tend to write your scripts with directing in mind.
I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.
There are no “old” movies-only movies you have already seen and ones you haven't.
What's genius about 'Gravity' is that you are close upon the actors, but 3D works best when you have foreground, middle ground and background.
I just want to see more women in film and behind the camera. I'm tired of seeing movies from one perspective.
I try to make all the action in my movies subjective: to give a sense of what it would feel like to actually be a part of it.
I think we shouldn't be shy of thinking that we can interpret text like a movie again, depending on the point of view and what we do with it more than anything else. Of course a lot of remakes of important films, particularly of horror films, they suck.
I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
I always thought that's the wonderful thing about filmmaking: people see things differently.
I just like movies that somehow expose the world in a way that's different than you imagine it.
The reality is that each movie has got to be seen in its own light.
My parents would watch movies like 'Big' and 'Freaky Friday,' and I wanted to see that kind of story told from an African-American angle. So I had the idea for 'Little,' and then I told my parents, and we all fleshed it out together.
When I'm making a movie, I never watch the dailies. I see the movie once and that's it. It's really not about that for me. It's not about the externals. When I'm on a set, I don't want to see it. I want to be subjective in it. That's my habit now.
That is the great pleasure of working with great directors. You get to look at the world through many different prisms. I guess I love talent, whatever form it takes.
