Maybe because I come from choreography, I've always felt that there's something about action films that made it very natural for me to go that way. It's story through movement.
In the early '90s when the American independent movie started, it held personal vision as a premium. That was brilliant timing.
In the 80s, parallel cinema gained momentum. So, I got back to films and won National awards for Maqbool' and other films.
Every actor has to move in a Terrence Malick film - that's the requirement. If you stop, he'll tell you, 'No, no, keep moving.' You can't be static. It's a choreography.
My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.
Things danced on the screen do not look the way they do on the stage. On the stage, dancing is three-dimensional, but a motion picture is two-dimensional.
Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.
I'm a huge fan of Italian new realism, work by directors like Fellini and Vittorio De Sica. Their image of women is so beautiful.
I think the press mistakenly thought that all of these 'mumblecore' filmmakers were banded together in a similar ideology, but the truth is that we were all just using the same digital camera and helping each other make our movies because we were broke, and we were the only idiots willing to do it.
When I moved to Paris in the '70s, there wasn't very much going on in film in England. So when I started doing French films, there was a natural movement toward the kind of films I wanted to do. It wasn't the reason I came, but it so happened that I stepped into a time and place that actually corresponded to what I wanted. That sometimes happens in life. And it was rather beautiful.
I love the idea of thinking of cinema as not that far from music. A lot of my favourite movie makers, the way they move their cameras or the way they cut just feel very musical - even if the movies have no music in them at all.
Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.
We're like the raw food movement in cinema - so determined to give people things that do some good, that they recognize as real.
Neorealism taught us to follow the characters with the camera, allowing each shot its own real interior time. Well, I became tired of all this; I could no longer stand real time. In order to function, a shot must show only what is useful.
