top of page
Film Quotes


"When I watch a movie for the first few times I'm usually thinking about where I was in a given scene, who was next to me, what we were doing etc. But after I've gotten through all of this, when I'm really watching the film itself, then I get moved."


"Lord of the Rings was something I always wanted to do. I read the book when I was about 25, and I was always hoping if it was ever made into a feature film that I would be involved in some way. And then I finally got it, and I was over the moon. It was fantastic news."


"Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined."
Film,


"When I was in film school, it was said that all good films were characterised by some form of humour."


"I want to do feature films. I am flying to Malaysia to be in another feature film. We will be filming that in Malaysia, the Phillipines, and back in California."


"Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement."
Film,


"There is so much to do on a film set. It is an extraordinarily invigorating and wonderful place to be, when things are running well."


"I did some film reviews for small papers in Finland and things like that to be able to keep living here."


"The French have got to understand that a film is so expensive that it can no longer afford to be regional or even national in scope."
Film,


"Minority views expressed in films simply don't sell tickets."


"I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me."


"Take a film of Jacques Tati like Mon Oncle which has something quite new - for me, unique - in it."
Film,


"When you're on a set it can be very tedious and slow. It's just not as big as when you see it on film."
Film,


"My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam."


"What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek."


"The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same."


"Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined."


"The sound is the key; audiences will accept visual discontinuity much more easily than they'll accept jumps in the sound. If the track makes sense, you can do almost anything visually."


"The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself."


"I recently turned down a film that I didn't want my kids to see. Priorities shift. Sometimes I'm sad about that, but not enough to do anything about it."


"I knew nothing about martial arts. And I don't really like it! But in the film, I not only had to pretend that I knew all about it, I had to be the best at it. That was very difficult."


"And if you're a golfer and you watch a golf film and Matt Damon swing, and it's not great, then you're not going to believe in the golf story, you're not going to believe in the rest of the film. That's the whole movie, so if that swing looks like crap, the movie's crap."


"I'd like to do a piece of Shakespeare. Any upcoming Shakespeare film. Just a bit to say I did a classic."


"I liked The Slipper and the Rose, as I have already mentioned, because it was such a lovely film to do."
Film,


"There's a personal story of my own that I will write at some point, and it's a film that I will happily make. It could very well be the next thing I do, unless someone shows me something great."


"It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were."


"Film is changing, and it can't help but keep changing."


"When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it."


"I'd always tried not to worry about the size of the role or the size of the film."


"The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary."
bottom of page
