When you're trying to come up with an idea for a movie it's actually the hardest part - the germ of the idea. Inevitably you think of something that would be great and then discover that it was on an episode of The Simpsons.
You don't want to be starting a film not knowing what you want to do.
Back before 'Brick,' I wrote a short film that I never ended up shooting: hit men in the present who work for a mob in the future who send their victims back in time. A guy is sent his future self, he lets him run, and the whole short was them chasing each other across the city. That sat in a drawer for 10 years until after I made 'Brothers Bloom.
I don't start a film with the heroine but with the cinema subject. If there is a woman in the story, she has to be of a particular type. It's not as if I start with Madhuri Dixit and then think what kind of film.
For 'Jeremiah Johnson,' nobody wanted to make that film. I went to Sydney Pollack, and I said, 'Sydney, I live in the mountains, and I would like to make a film about a person that had to exist in the mountains and survive in the mountains.'
I just always thought 'Groundhog Day' was potentially a great idea.
When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.
Mr. Cooper said to me that he had an idea for a film in mind. The only thing he'd tell me was that I was going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. Naturally, I thought of Clark Gable.
Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept.
I haven't thought about making a music film, but if I did, that would be a very interesting idea.
Pfft, who wants to make a movie about a guy in a house?
I remember reading 'Disturbia,' one of the first scripts I ever got, and I go 'Pfft, who wants to make a movie about a guy in a house?'
Somewhere down the line, I felt the need to come to grips with the realistic - or live action - image which seemed to me central to the notion of film. And then a whole new world opened to me.
These properties that get made into movies, some are easier than others. When they first said, 'Yeah, they're making a movie out of Lego,' I said, 'Lego what? What does that even mean?' And it's such a good concept.
I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory.
A script is like a theory of a movie.
I went to Dave Eggers with this idea of doing a movie about a guy going through some sort of Frank Capra-esque journey.
There's so little difference between television and features as far as you make the film. I mean, you have less money and it's a little quicker, but the concept is all on television.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.
We really want to see how the idea of an intellectual action movie is received by the world.
I've toyed with this idea [of Fresh Hell] for a long time. I actually wrote a feature years ago with this sort of concept in mind, and it's gone through several incarnations, and... It wasn't 'til I met Chris Ellis, who directed me in a little thing that was actually for a ride in Universal Singapore, for those of you who happen to be going to Universal Singapore.
Frank called me one day and said, 'I have an idea for a movie, why don't you come over and I'll tell you?' So I went over and we sat down and he said, 'This picture starts in heaven'. That shook me.
When a movie is made, you toy with many ideas, and a prequel to 'Dabangg' is one of them.
I'm going to make a film where not one word is really important. I'm going to make it all action.
I would love to do a 'Scream'-type movie.
