People say 'The Wire's bleak, y'know, but I see it as a love letter to Baltimore, and it's one written in a very strange and complex way.
Where I'm from is like 'Hustle & Flow' versus '8 Mile.' It's that really grimy, box-Chevy, dope-boy, working-class music.
Shameless is a rough show, and it’s not for everyone, but it’s also beautiful.
One of the reasons I do like 'Cult' is that it plays along the same vibe as the movie 'Seven,' which I absolutely love. There was a period of cinema in the mid-'90s that I was a huge fan of, with 'Heat' and 'Seven' and the Tarantino era. If I've ever been fanatical, it was about those films, back in the day.
The violence you witness is Denzel doing it and we're taking some visual effects and doing some things and you see something happen it's happening in front of you as opposed to cutting away and doing a bunch of tricks. It's in front of you. So it's hard not to make it a hard "R" if you see a guy get punched and teeth wind up in someone's knuckles.
In 'Deadpool,' we stayed far away from the shiny, clean X-Men world. It's really the seedy underbelly of what's been shown in other superhero films.
With gritty action and realistic science, Peter Watts brings to life a dark and vivid world.
I knew that for this movie to work it had to be very hot and very real, and it wasn't going to be a case of doing it Hollywood all covered with a nice little sheet.
Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
A bonus, being a writer, is that the true-life source material is fabulously bizarre. There's so much corruption, violence and free-floating depravity that the well never runs dry, whether you're a novelist, a journalist, or both.
I think of 'Shrapnel' as the anti-'Star Trek.'
I like films that are gritty and hard-hitting and suspenseful. Thrillers, too.
With horror movies, a bigger budget is actually your enemy. You want to feel the rough edges, the handmade quality to good horror films. It's a genre that benefits from not having everything at your disposal.
I really like romantic comedies and light movies and everything but I think - I don't know where it comes from - but when you're doing violent movies, you're closer to reality.
A movie like 'The Last House On The Left' would be very hard to do in Europe.
People who are kind of at the cutting edge of life and survival, and being near the nitty-gritty, like my films, and I like that.
Funny as hell, searingly honest, and urgently real, Sam Pink's Rontel puts to shame most modern fiction. His writing perfectly captures the bizarre parade that is Chicago, with all its gloriously odd and wonderful people. This book possesses both the nerve of Nelson Algren and the existential comedy of Albert Camus.
I don't think anyone takes the deaths in Midsomer as seriously as in say Wire In The Blood or Silent Witness. We're part of the old British 'whodunnit'. We're much more gentle and the deaths are sanitised, in a sense.
In terms of 'Ray Donovan,' the story is so rich, the actors are so fantastic, the writing is impeccable. And it's such beautiful storytelling with complex characters.
I did 'Kidulthood' and 'Adulthood,' and that's what people wanted and expect me to always do. They want me to do 'hood films and be the guy swinging baseball bats and saying 'Yo Blood' and beating up others in the street.
I think what we're trying to do as filmmakers is make a big, gritty, raw, epic movie and within that show things graphically in a way that they haven't been seen in that world before.
I remember watching 'The Wire,' because I absolutely adored 'The Wire,' and there were so many secret layers within that drama, and it was just fantastic.
I remember telling people I booked this job; they were like, 'What is it called?' I was like, 'Peaky Blinders,' and they were like, 'What?' It sounds ridiculous, but I like it because there's an instant intrigue about the name.
From 'Midnight Cowboy' to 'Taxi Driver' is a brief era whose grit, beauty, and violence has been quite mythologized.
'The Wire' was a combination of great TV and great theater.
