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I think that screenwriting probably isn't seen as writing in the same way that novel-writing is seen as writing. But I certainly don't see it that way.
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My approach to directing is to not do very much directing. I'm mainly interested in what the creative group individually and together are thinking.
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I don't write on set. I also - in a funny way, I don't really differentiate between the writing and directing. I think it's all sort of the same thing.
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I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.
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If someone says Wes Anderson is an auteur, I'll believe it 100 percent. Fine. He's an auteur, but I'm not.
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I didn't intend to be a novelist. I didn't intend to be anything. I thought I'd be a journalist.
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Really original material is quite hard to find.
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I didn't go to film school.
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I've never been to Comic-Con, but I'm certainly aware from this side of the Atlantic that it's a very important part of film marketing now, even when the films are not directly linked to a comic.
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Sequels are generally done in a rush. They're done with a sense of urgency. The first time, you spend a long time developing to get it over the line. The second time, you don't. Your expectations are different, and your motivations are different.
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The first draft of 'Ex Machina' is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.
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What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.
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The truth is, I hadn't grown up really wanting to be a writer. The whole thing was a weird aberration in some ways, and I didn't feel personally connected to the level of success I had with it - the success of sorts, I guess.
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When I'm really fixated on a bit of writing, I can easily spend six days without leaving the house and barely leaving my room.
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I didn't like being a name attached to a book.
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'The Beach' novel, in my mind, was, in some respects, subversive.
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I'm always pushing back against the last thing I did in some way, and some of that is restlessness and a sense of limited time.
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The scripts of 'The Wire' are fantastic - the scripts of 'Breaking Bad,' the scripts of 'Mad Men,' the scripts of 'The Sopranos,' the scripts of 'Battlestar Galactica.' You could keep going on. They're incredibly well written.
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A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.
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I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.
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I know some directors get very involved in trailers and posters. Some even cut their own. I stay completely away from it. I just see my job as making a film.
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There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.
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When I see 'Sunshine,' I see a film that part of me is kind of very proud of and another part of me is very sad about, so it's a really complicated film for me. And I've never been really able to resolve all that in myself.
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Part of debunking the mythology of filmmaking is that we tend to want to locate it often in one person. And it's not one person. It's a collective, and it is a collaboration.