Popularity: 1
Vote:   | Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Actors get used to scenes being cut. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate. My language to each of them has to suit their brain. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | America is a country in which you can tell universal stories. It's a country in which you can express these things freely. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Annette Bening... is on her Walkman half an hour before the cameras roll, cutting off the set, focused down, listening to the music that the character would listen to. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | As a first-time director in America, I feel I've been very fortunate. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | As I got everything wrong at the same time-costume, design and performance-it made it easier in a way, because I could see the film I didn't want to make. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Daniel Craig has the hypermasculine charisma of Russell Crowe. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Directing, I realize, on film is far more personal, you know. Cinema really is a director's medium. This is a very personal film. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | For me, certain shots or scenes are keys in the movie. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I am not a master-class director. I am not a teacher. I am a coach. I don't have a methodology. Each actor is different. And on the film set, you have to be next to them all. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I deliberately, in a way, went for something that was a huge challenge and was a big period film. I was excited about the canvas on which I could tell the story as much as the story itself. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I didn't shoot very good stuff in the first couple of days. I reshot the first day, and about half the second day I didn't use at all. I hit my stride fairly quickly, partly because I had a great cinematographer, and partly because I storyboarded. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I don't think good and evil are polarized. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I don't think of it as a competition - which might surprise you, given the way movies are reported constantly. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | I froze for a bit, in truth-for about six months after the Oscars... There were lots of scripts landing on my desk. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I got absolutely everything wrong that first day, you know, and in film, the director is pretty much solely to blame. And in the end, you get what you ask for. If the design is wrong, or costumes or wrong, that's because you've asked for them one day and then the next day you don't like them. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I kind of forgot that it was Paul Newman. He's a great actor and came to do a job. But when he walked on set, everyone went quiet. Three or four days into the shoot, he arrived. Then you suddenly realize. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I like throwing snowballs at small children. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I play a lot of cricket. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I still can't quite believe it. Although there was something about the fact that it was a first-time writer, a first-time producer, and a first-time director all at the same time. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I think that's a wonderful thing when there's somebody at the top of their game but they still want to test themselves. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I think with Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense, people are much more open to something that is different. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I want to try and work in different genres with different types of actors, on small movies and big movies. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I wanted it to be a story about human beings escaping imprisonment. It sounds very pretentious, but it's a rite-of-passage story that isn't just about America, but about human beings living together. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I wanted to keep exploring... I'm not about to choose a series of movies in which I can use the same bag of tricks and style that I used in the first film. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was really pleased to hear that Scorsese built the whole of New York in 1840 for Gangs of New York. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I work very slowly. Some people are able to get through post-production in 10 weeks. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I'm certainly getting a lot more mail... that's basically it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'm completely amazed and delighted. I kept my fingers crossed it would get good critical reaction, but the real surprise is that it's crossed over into the mainstream so comprehensively. I wasn't expecting that. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I'm from the theater, where the process of creating a character from the ground up is something that's not imposed on him. We started working on it months in advance, and we rehearsed for two weeks, and even the look of his apartment came out of discussions with him and the production designer. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | If you lived through the shooting of Jaws, you can live through anything. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | In terms of being an outsider in America and having a certain type of objectivity to a degree, there were a few times I thought to myself: What on earth am I doing here? I'm a Brit making a movie so firmly set in the States! |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | It always gets worse as you get older. You get more nervous, there's more to lose. He's got to live up to being Paul Newman. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | It took me a long time to film the plastic bag, and then I had to get the cut of the scene right. But if you find it as beautiful as the character does, then suddenly it becomes a different movie, and so did he as a character. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It's a risk casting anyone against type or what they're known to do. But there's one thing better than having a great actor, which is having a great actor who's never done what you're asking him to do. He's hungry to get out of the trailer every day and hungry to test himself. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | It's great, it's exciting, you can't pretend that it isn't. I couldn't help but remember Close Encounters when I was a kid. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It's very hard doing a period movie. You have to do everything, from the streetlamps to covering up the road markings. Every bystander has to be in period costume. You have to plan very carefully. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Just because I hold a shot for more than five seconds and it's all a deliberate tableau, people say it's theater. It's not really. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Kevin and Annette... I wanted them to do it together. They clearly wanted to work with each other. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Kevin Spacey likes to joke and... do impersonations right up to the moment of action, on his mobile phone to his agent or whatever. The more relaxed, the more jovial he is, the more he's not thinking about what he does. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Kurosawa films that are not dialogue-based. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Now I'm back home, living in London, running my theater. I just want to enjoy all that. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | One movie is only one movie. I want to have a lifetime of making films. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | One of the reasons I loved working with Tom is people feel they know who he is... I think working with an actor who the audience already has a relationship with actually helps you in a film like this. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | People are capable of good and bad. As long as we continue perpetrating these absurd two-dimensional stories that everything is black and white - you're either good or bad - then the longer we'll misunderstand how many interesting stories you can tell in the space that exists between the two. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | So much of what we were trying to do here is to give the lie to the perceived notions of gangster movies, which is difficult, given the fact that we've seen so many of them, brilliantly done and otherwise. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Story and cutting patterns are sometimes muddled in an audience's mind. This is a lot of story in less than two hours. Because it's not cut fast doesn't mean there's not a lot of story going on. Sometimes there's an impression of a lot happening in a movie, and nothing is actually happening. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Thank God I don't live in Los Angeles. I think if you're there the whole time it just gets out of proportion and you lose touch completely with reality. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The characters are trapped within the lifestyle. It's about what goes on before the movie starts. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | There is an immense, childlike enthusiasm about the man. It's inspiring when you work with a 77-year-old man who has that kind of love and excitement still in him about what he does. And like Paul Newman, each day is like the first day of his career. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | There's one thing better than having a great actor, and that's having a great actor who's never done this kind of role before and is hungry to do it. They're testing themselves every day. They want to get out of their trailer and get to work. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | There's one two-minute scene that I took out because I felt in the end Capone was a more sinister and frightening presence in the film if he never appeared. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | This is the first time in 10 years I don't know what I'm doing next, and I'm rather enjoying it. Soon I'll be climbing the walls no doubt, but right now, it's not clear, I'm just enjoying the freedom. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Truly great actors carry their characters in silence with them. They communicate without words the relationships that predate the movie. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Violence is something that's very deliberately chosen - who sees it, the effect it has on the person watching, and the person performing the act of violence is more important than the violence itself. It's not about a gore-fest or how much blood you can show. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When I drive through a field, I want to see green grass sometimes, and I don't want to see black and white. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | You can over-think it. You've just got to go and trust your instincts. I wanted to find a movie that was completely different from the first one. Although, thematically at its core, it's not all that different; it's still about family. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | You do things bit by bit. That's the only way to play something really original, where the details stand out. You're not just showing us a cliched, generic character that you've seen before. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You freeze with the number of opportunities given to you and just decide to do nothing at all. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | You have to have a secret... There is a hidden movie in all the best films. The secret is in every frame... in a good movie, there is always a shadow movie underneath the text, which allows the film to float above reality. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | You just never know when movies are going to take off or not. The lucky thing about this was that it didn't cost a lot of money, and therefore there wasn't loads of pressure on me. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | You make the movies for audiences. You get as many people to see the movie as possible. You do not make them for Academy voters. There are only 6,000 and me. It's going to get at least one vote. I'll vote across the board for my movie. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You think about taking audiences on a journey. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | You try to explain what you see. You have to do it with everyone. You're explaining how it looks, how it feels, its atmospheres and colors, what you feel thematically, what you feel the film is reaching for. You hope that they want to make it with you. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You're in the lap of the gods. If people go, they go, and if they don't. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You've got to believe as a filmmaker that if a movie's good enough, it's going to survive; and if it's not, well, it won't. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | You've got to work. You've got to want an audience to sit forward in their chairs sometimes, rather than sit back and be bombarded with images. |