Louis Malle is maybe one of my favorite directors, but I love Tarantino.
You go back to those films of the '40s and '50s and hear the dialogue, the way the people played off each other - the wordplay. I think we've really lost that in movies.
Mike Leigh is my all-time favourite writer/director/creator.
Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
The movies that I love and model after, like 'Annie Hall,' 'When Harry Met Sally,' and in particular for me, 'Broadcast News,' are the tone of life, which isn't a setup punch-line every two minutes.
The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood.
I think the Merchant Ivory brand really means literate dialogue. I think it starts with that. When people say something, you know it has some sort of ripples to it.
I am a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino, who takes time to figure out what his next movie is.
