At times, you're welcome, depending on what's being cast. 'Dances with Wolves' - they wanted authentic-looking Indians in the film, and so they got it. The same was true with 'The Last of the Mohicans' and 'Geronimo.'
Here's an easy way to see if a war movie is being truthful: If you see an explosion on a faraway hillside and the sound of the explosion and the detonation of the bomb happen at the same time - if they're putting the sound and the vision together in the same moment - they're going toward our cultural understanding of war, not the reality of war.
There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.
Much has been written about Generation X and the films about it. Clerks is so utterly authentic that its heroes have never heard of their generation. When they think of "X," it's on the way to the video store.
Sometimes movies gloss over things, and it was important to me that this was realistic.
The question is - did Richard Attenborough have a right to make 'Gandhi?' And did Danny Boyle have a right to make 'Slumdog Millionaire?' Quite honestly, if they didn't have the right to make these films, I had no right to make 'Elizabeth.'
Probably Lloyd in 'Say Anything' is the closest to me - or to who I was at the time. It was just a great love story about people in the '80s, and we all tried to make it feel as real as possible. It was such a wonderful time. We didn't leave anything in the gym; we put it all out there.
It often strikes me that the actors in high school movies look too old.
We're all complex human beings, and if some of that complexity shows through, I think it's advantageous for the movie.
Naturally we need black men to give this movie serious credibility.
It's really crucial to achieve that balance with a film like this, cause it is unique and witty and then there's the tendency to force that. It becomes contrived and I know the feeling like, give me a fork that I can stab in my eye in those kinds of movies.
Actors say they do their own stunts for the integrity of the film but I did them because they looked like a lot of fun.
I'm lucky enough to be able to make only movies I'm interested in seeing. That has to be an instinctive thrust. The audience knows when you're faking it. They can hang any kind of moniker they want on me.
I find it terribly distracting in movies when people do accents, I must say, unless it's terribly serious and the story is rooted in South Africa and you're doing a South African accent. But in period movies I think nothing can be more distracting than people doing accents.
I could take my grandma and put her in a cape, and they'll put her on a green screen, and they'll have stunt doubles come in and do all the action. Anybody can do it. They're relying on stunt doubles and green screen and $200 million budgets - it's all CGI created. To me, it's not authentic.
It's difficult to find a movie that feels true to itself. You feel the hand of Hollywood, the moviemaking by committee, on everything.
I just think action films now have... often, because you can do anything with CGI, people do. And I don't think you necessarily should. You lose that sort of human dimension, and you get all the stuff breaking the laws of physics.
Hollywood has done some of these films, and some of them are ginormous biblical movies, but you can tell the people making these are not invested in the truth of what those stories are biblically. It shows in the work.
Without naming names, I think other movies look more realistic but they feel less real.
For my first Hollywood film, I really didn't want to be doing a film where I'm looking like a stooge with fake snakes that look like socks.
'Swingers' was a little closer to what my real experience was. 'Crazy Eyes,' whoever's experience that is, I'm telling you what, that was one heck of a ride.
Sometimes, there's not an honest engagement of Ireland in Hollywood movies.
We shouldn't be chasing other movies, but stay true to the tone of Man of Steel.
Science-fiction cities in general, I think, are so hard to get right, because it's so easy to just play some cheesy music or do something that takes you right out of it, but 'Blade Runner' got it right, and I love that about the film.
