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I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.
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A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets. But now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson, and that he saved me in every way that a person can be saved. I don't even have a picture of him. He exists now only in my memory.
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I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all.
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So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.
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I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.
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You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything.
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Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.
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My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.
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Inspiration can hit you in the head at any time in any context. It could happen in a conversation. Talking to someone at a party, you can get an idea. But you've got to remember those inspirations.
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The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.
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Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.
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I don't use film cameras. I don't do visual effects the same way. We don't use miniature models; it's all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It's a completely different toolset. But the rules of storytelling are the same.
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To convince people to back your idea, you've got to sell it to yourself and know when it's the moment. Sometimes that means waiting. It's like surfing. You don't create energy, you just harvest energy already out there.
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Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.
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I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.
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It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.
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You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they'll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself.
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I'm the king of the world!
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Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.
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What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?
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I See you.
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This is how it's done. When people are sitting on shit that you want, you make 'em your enemy. Then you justify taking it.
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I'm hopeful that we'll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.
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The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there's an alien world here on Earth.