Nadunisi Naaigal' is new age Tamil cinema. I have tried to break the rules of regular cinema with this film.
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
It's hard to get a film, you know, you need a very special film to be able to get that experimental. But, I would love to see that happen. I would love the opportunity to be more experimental than I am.
I wanted to shoot straight, mainstream, somehow off-beat. Not only realistic West, which is quite unfamiliar to the world's population - even to a lot of Americans.
I went to film school, and I came in when video art was king, weird stuff was king, and there, you don't have a script as your bible.
If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.
I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.
If there's one thing that television doesn't really do, and has never really done, is to tell a surreal story.
'Samurai' is not an animated show like you would normally watch on TV. We tell the stories from a different perspective - backward, very nonlinear. It treats it more seriously as an art form.
Well, I always looked at Mulan as a movie about a lesbian coming out.
Usually in France we prefer to say bad things about the Nouvelle Vague, but I'm always impressed with its freedom and the fact of not making a film to give your opinion but just as a piece of art, which to me means the Nouvelle Vague.
I am not a conventional hero. I am a regular guy trying to entertain people.
'Scott Pilgrim' is something that was a little bit more difficult to put in one box. But, to me, that's not necessarily a bad thing about the movie.
I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.
I think there are a lot of books about thin, attractive people having thin, attractive people's problems. I'm better set up to tell a different story.
Most biopics are stories of people who achieve something. It's an easier graph, a rags-to-riches story, or wanting something and reaching that. Sanju's life is not actually a case like that.
Almost anything can be justified as a style of filmmaking if it works.
What I'm really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its "about"-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you're interested in the subject.
I think always my interest in making movies is to have something really technical mixed with something that was not so formal...something free.
I don't think 'Road' is an experimental film.
I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.
If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror.
Things have character. So I'm interested in how the character of the thing might function as a protagonist in what isn't a narrative.
Independent filmmaking burns off a lot of storytelling fat.
One of the things that I love about Robert Altman's movies is that, really, a Robert Altman movie is just a bunch of short films about various people told at the same time.
