Film Constraints Quotes

That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.

There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.

It's hard to get an inner dialogue in a film. It's not cinematic. But in a musical, the character can just turn to the audience and sing.

We had a tiny budget for 'The Greatest,' which was the opposite of 'Wall Street.' We just kind of went in and did it. You've got four or five takes and then you've got to move on. We didn't even have trailers to stay in or anything.

We shot 'Party Girl' on film, and I remember being told, 'We need to get this in two takes because we don't have a lot of film in the mag right now!'

Being on television is a little constraining. You spend six to eight months filming, and you get stuck in that gear. I feel like doing movies is a lot more my style.

I'd like to use IMAX. The problem with IMAX is that it's a very loud camera. It's a very unreliable camera. Only so much film can be in the camera. You can't really do intimate scenes with it.

The thing with movies is, because you have so little time, I always feel like there are more things we could've done with the character. If we'd done a sequel to 'The Thomas Crown Affair,' what would that have been like? But for the most part, you try not to think of that, because it's just going to break your heart.

I made it about a three-day weekend so people wouldn't have to change their clothes a lot. We didn't have an art department; we didn't have a make-up department.

I am against great themes and great subjects... You can't film an idea. The camera is an instrument for recording physical impact.

The difficulty with film is you always have to consign a story to being a certain length, whereas with a book you don't have budget constraints; you can cast it yourself.

In this business, you have a hierarchy of stars. Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks - you name 'em, they can play any part they want. Guys like me who are somewhere down in the middle of the pack, that's a different story. I can do things in the theater that I can't do anyplace else.

In the theatre you can change things ever so slightly; it's an organic thing. Whereas in film you only have that chance on the day, and you have no control over it at all.

For me, the challenge of a period film is that, unlike a contemporary film where the character can be very free-form when it comes to the acting, there's a burden to acting in a period film because you have to stay within the character's historical background and the gestures of certain periods.

There's no continuity in videos... you can jump around all over the place. In features, you can't throw in a close-up of a musician stomping on a guitar - you have to film a scene.