A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.
People don't know what they are doing most of the time. They don't know what they want. It's only in 'the movies' that they know what their problems are and have game plans to deal with them.
When I was asked to come over to the States, I thought to myself, 'What the Americans are very good at doing is creating stories with strong movement and plots that carry the movie as it goes along.'
This is my one beef with Hollywood: It's great for movie sales, but they've created this fiction for us that, when you have a hard thing in your life, it's going to get fixed, and then your life will be awesome! Forever!
I give importance only to the story of a movie.
'Dune' was like a giant machine, and it was hard to keep track of all the pieces, but 'Blue Velvet' was a very sleek, compact little experience.
When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.
I think its important for movies to recognize that they are part of a history of movies. I also think that most movies are about movies anyway, even if they're about something else.
To me, when there's movies that are about, you know, guys named Hell Boy, and you know, the issue that they have with our movie that she doesn't get an abortion, I mean, I think there's greater suspensions of disbelief.
Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.
I'm a firm believer, and some people may disagree, and I'm happy to have a beer with them and talk about it, but I believe that locations are such an integral character to the movie.
I want to be in a good movie, and so the narrative is way more important.
A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it's really not about that. Or rather it's about feelings in the abstract.
I think the character does tend to suit an episodic thing, because what's fun about him is that he doesn't care about anyone else, and it's very difficult for a main character - a lead character - in a movie to not care about anybody else.
You can always tell in a movie when they are setting you up for something. If someone leaves an important object on the table and walks away, the camera will have some way of indicating that to you.
In movies we tend make things black and white: you're either this, or you're that.
It's great to have the chance to play a character before he goes to the dark side, or the yellow side if you will. Normally, you don't get that opportunity. The narrative of a movie usually demands that you are that guy from the start.
Every movie is a love story.
Movies are about time. You can take that momentum and manipulate time as well, or you can deliberately slow it down, stop it, and start it again. There is no other art form that does that type of manipulation in that way.
The biggest challenge is not the storytelling, it's to track every character's arc through the entire movie.
To me, there was something moving about the idea of telling the story of a lady who is, in a way, a forgotten character - someone who would normally be a secondary role in a movie.
Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that.
If a movie has more characters than an audience can keep track of, the audience will get confused and lose interest in the story.
The nature of a movie story is you have to keep charging forward and keep the audience with the story.
I'm always really impressed when a movie can function like a novel does - that's so hard to do.
