I like 1977 because it is more primitive. If it were modern day, like one Universal guy was like wouldn't they just use their cell phone? I guess he did not read that it was 1977 in the script.
If you are not moved by the character, no amount of CGI will give you a performance that is emotionally engaging or devastating - what a live-action performance does.
I think the good thing about Dogme is that it forces you into an extreme sense of reality because there's no artificial light and no set design and all of those icings on the cake that you usually have on a movie.
Horror movies can be - I don't wanna say not real, but so over-the-top: you can get scared 'cos things are loud and in-your-face, but these are real emotions that I'm using.
When I was making 'Satya', many people said that nobody would like to watch such dirty people. But, when the film worked, the same people said it was so real that they could actually smell it!
Having been a cameraman, I think about, 'Well, if this was real, how would this be shot?' I try to inject as much realism as much as possible.
I want to see movies where I can relate to the guy.
I don't like James Bond. They made him a super hero, but he is just an agent, a human being. In my movies, secret agents are more realistic, I didn't want to portray them in the most glowing colours.
35mm film isn't ticking away so it's subconscious - performances are allowed to breathe in a much more real way I think.
You never saw Peter Sellers the actor trying to make you laugh. All he was doing was the character. What I'm saying is that I don't think you should know you're in a movie. I don't like it when actors are winking at the audience and saying, 'Right, isn't this funny? Are you with me?'
I would watch 'Wizard of Oz,' like every day, when I was two. I had a hard time understanding that I couldn't go into the film, because it felt so real to me.
I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today's movies. They believe everything they're hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.
It often strikes me that the actors in high school movies look too old.
The scenes in the show were filmed with a crew of really excellent stunt jumpers, but we had the feel of the parachutes, so we could be more realistic in the roles.
Almost always, when we have fights in movies, they're done in these strange rooms where nothing gets broken. It's almost like they're in padded cells.
I intentionally shoot violence to make the audience feel real pain. I have never and I will never shoot violence as if it's some kind of action video game.
In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.
There are all kinds of ways that people present their films, but that's kind of a good feeling, if you can make it seem like the characters are really there.
I remember when I saw 'The Dark Knight' movie, and I was sitting there watching it, and there actually came one or two places where I had trouble divorcing myself from the reality of the locations because it was filmed in Chicago, and I know that city quite well.
I grew up in L.A., and I don't think I've seen L.A. onscreen in a way that felt real to me. There are definitely movies, but they are few and far between.
I don't like high concept movies very much, and the kind of scripts that I would occasionally get offered tended to be really high concept comedies or romantic comedies. I just don't like it. I like much more realistic movies with actual psychology and behavior in them.
I personally feel like, if you're watching a film about war, you should get a sense of what it's really like.
There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.
Alejandro Amenabar is a different kind of director than I lot of the directors I've asked for. He really asks you to enter his dream as opposed to, you know, a guy like Sidney Lumet or something is going to ask you to create a character almost like a documentary. He wants you to make the people really real and he's going to capture it like a documentarian.
I always feel that there's no violence in a movie - it's not real, it's a magic trick. Nobody is really dying. In fact, the people that die in my movies have gone on to become extremely successful!
