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You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'
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I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.
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For us, destiny always feels... if you obey, it's almost a passive thing.
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You don't realize it, but often people are frightened of the director.
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I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.
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That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.
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If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.
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I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.
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Actors want to impress at the beginning, so you take advantage of that by suddenly saying, 'Right, you're here for two weeks.' What you're doing is creating a siege mentality.
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I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.
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I am a sci-fi fan.
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Originally I'm a big pop-music aficionado, that's my love.
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Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It's a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence. As is working within a circumspect budget.
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Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.
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To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.
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One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.
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It's a good place when all you have is hope and not expectations.
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If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn't do it.
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Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world, so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.
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It's not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it's what you learn about yourself, really. It's a funny old hippie thing, but it's true as well. You find out a lot about yourself and your tolerance, and about your inclusiveness.
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I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes.
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I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.
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It's easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for 'A Life Less Ordinary'.
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I always say to anybody who's going over to America for the first time, 'Whatever you do, go and see a popular mainstream film with a big audience.' Because people shout out. You never get that in Britain. Everybody's so quiet, scared to laugh. It's like being in church.