Filmmaking Styles Quotes

There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock's (the film is complete in the director's mind) and Coppola's (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola's approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.

I would personally not run down any cinema just because I am not capable of making it. Anurag Kashyap makes a certain kind of cinema; I make a different kind. But when we meet, we are friendly.

Some men don't gel when it comes to work - you have different work ethics, different opinions, different points of views, different methods of filmmaking - and we didn't gel.

What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of 'documentary.'

For filmmakers who've made multiple movies, they have experience, but they only have experience of themselves as a filmmaker. Whereas I'm bouncing around from different skill sets: the organizational ability of Ridley Scott to the precision of a Ron Howard to the artistic sensibilities of a Peter Weir... to the scope of a Tom Hooper.

Most of my films have been documentaries, but I'm also very interested in narrative filmmaking.

I believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinéma vérité.

Different directors have different techniques in the use of films. Cronenberg is very different in the way he works with film, and how he takes the audience into his films is different than how Peter Jackson would do that or Jon Stewart. So, if you go between those artists, you shift gears and you kind of fall into the working method of that film.

I always enjoy working with an international crew and director. But on the set of a Hollywood action film - now that's a whole other world. The sheer grand scale of the way things are done over there makes me envious; it's just so different from the way things are done in Japan.

On a serious note, I just enjoy exploring the unconventional. I like Alfred Hitchcock; I actually grew up watching his films. A thriller gives you much more scope of exhibiting creativity in terms of playing with the camera and sound, as against a typical love story.