When you're trying to come up with an idea for a movie it's actually the hardest part - the germ of the idea. Inevitably you think of something that would be great and then discover that it was on an episode of The Simpsons.
While shooting for 'Kodi' at Pollachi, I got this new idea for 'VIP 2'.
'Pied Piper' came to me all at once; I wanted to do a fairy-tale movie with some edge, but not 'dark,' per se.
The original idea [ of the Pineapple Express] came from Judd [Apatow] actually. He just kind of had the loose notion of like, 'What about a weed action movie?'.
Mr. Cooper said to me that he had an idea for a film in mind. The only thing he'd tell me was that I was going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. Naturally, I thought of Clark Gable.
Sometimes I might feel like [a movie] is kind of a weird idea and if I'm going to get enough money to execute it properly I've got to get somebody in it that is going to justify the expense.
The golden age of Hollywood was the conceit of the movie and the style of the movie.
Well, this movie I've been working on for a while. I had the idea for the movie like twenty years ago when I was doing 'Empire of the Sun' in 1987 because at that time that's when all these Vietnam movies were being made and my friends and I were going on auditions for these Vietnam movies and my friends were getting them and going away to fake boot camps.
I wanted to do a naval film and I flirted with different ideas, most of which ended up being too intense. So when the idea of 'Battleship' was first suggested, I was instantly drawn to the challenge - could I invent a movie around the idea of five ships fighting five ships?
I went to Dave Eggers with this idea of doing a movie about a guy going through some sort of Frank Capra-esque journey.
Catterick' was originally a movie. That was what we intended for it and we had the money for it and everything. But we couldn't be bothered - I know that sounds terrible, but it's the truth. At a later stage we went back, split it up and made it into the TV series. But, yeah that was supposed to be a movie and we just didn't bother.
You've heard me talk about the quantum realm in Ant-Man which was certainly designed for that movie and for that story to take the notion of somebody who has the ability to shrink to another level we've never seen before, but as we were doing that, and studying it and talking to the science advisors who are always more than willing to spend an afternoon with us and talk about these amazing things - the quantum realm is another dimension.
You can make a movie about anything, as long as it has a hook to hang the advertising on.
I'd like to see a really good kind of closeted 1950s vampire movies. The war is over, the Korean war is over, we're happy now, a little bit of Cold War paranoia ya know, and then mix it up a little bit. I just think there are so many avenues that you could do that.
'E.T.' depended absolutely on the concept of cinema, and I think that Steven Spielberg, who I'm very fond of, is a genius.
We named the film 'Action Jackson' because our hero, Ajay Devgn, is known as 'AJ,' and we thought it would be a good idea to use the initials and extend it into the title 'Action Jackson,' as Ajay is doing both action and dancing in the film.
A lot of times, I'll resist the temptation to visually define a movie until, one, I really understand just what the movie's about, and two, until I start talking to my cinematographer.
The idea right now - and it may evolve - would be a live-action movie where some of his characters would be animated. To me, this movie is very much about the creative process.
It is the idea that it's a movie in a movie. So I did it.
I went in right up front and said, This can't be about some guy in bandages. I didn't even want to do a horror movie. I took the concept and made a romantic adventure film. I like action heroes who don't take themselves too seriously. I wanted to make everyone take the mummy seriously, but it couldn't just be a guy in bandages. But the main thing was to build in surprises. That's one of the great things you can do with special effects.
It's much harder to play myself. If I ever do a movie again, it'll be a singing serial killer.
