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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."
48
"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,
33
"When I was in film school, it was said that all good films were characterised by some form of humour."
33
"I did some film reviews for small papers in Finland and things like that to be able to keep living here."
30
"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."
28
"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,
26
"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,
24
"Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined."
22
"Minority views expressed in films simply don't sell tickets."
21
"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."
21
"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."
19
"Take a film of Jacques Tati like Mon Oncle which has something quite new - for me, unique - in it."
Film,
18
"What happens to me is that I am first and foremost a film geek."
17
"My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam."
16
"I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me."
16
"I'd always tried not to worry about the size of the role or the size of the film."
13
"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."
12
"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."
12
"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."
12
"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it."
10
"There are a thousand weird untold stories in the Australian film industry, this has been one of them."
Film,
10
"I don't do a film unless it has a sword in it. And if it doesn't have a sword in it, I insist that they have one in the same room to keep me comfortable."
Film,
10
"The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself."
9
"The things that I've done that have totally been remembered, they've always started with the same kind of engine, they've always started with someone saying 'I have to make this film - I'm going to make this film whatever the odds'."
8
"When you are making the one you are doing, you think it is the greatest film going. And then you do another one and it is a great film."
Film,
8
"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."
8
"My stage successes have provided me with the greatest moments outside myself, my film successes the best moments, professionally, within myself."
8
"Film then does not promote socialist revolution in any consistent way."
8
"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."
8
"I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist."
8
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