Film is a strange thing.
Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.
But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you're not snooping into somebody else's lives?
You know, we love to categorise or label everything in our lives: people, movies. But I think that those are just the decorations. They, of course, work. They're great, but that's not the thrust of the film.
A film that can be described in words is not really a film.
I suppose once in a while, a filmmaker makes a movie that's more than just a sum of its parts, more than good acting or good filmmaking. It's something else that has nothing to do with what you've done. This is in 1999, made by people in 1999 for people in 1999 about people in 1999.
What I love about movies is, no matter how many people are involved or how complicated the process is, at the end of the day, it's just what's inside of that frame. It's going to be people sitting in a movie theater watching one shot at a time. And that's my focus.
Film is about what you are thinking. It's about what's inside.
I respect Malayalam films the same way I respect Bengali films. I think Malayalam films have not compromised on the essence and have kept their own statement and are coming up with very good themes.
I feel that film, as opposed to theatre, is about capturing that one, real moment.
Every movie is a love story.
No matter how many great performances or exciting visuals we put together for the movie, we found that it was all somewhat two dimensional until we added the emotional heart of Howard Shore's music. Then, and only then, did the film come to life.
My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way.
A short film is not a shortened feature film. It has a soul of its own.
The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.
After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.
Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they're about, I probably wouldn't be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what's at the heart of a film.
Film can express things that computers never will. Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness. Film is light and shadow.
I feel the best scripts are those that are originally written to be films: that is film in its purest sense.
Sony could have $50 million and a sound stage and A-list actors and never make the same film. The constraints on this film became the essence of this film, became the power of this film.
Whatever film I'm making, no matter how harsh or edgy it is, there has to be a core underneath the ebb and flow of it that is heartfelt.
