Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Jamaican director Stephen Hopkins.
Last updated on November 4, 2024.
Stephen Hopkins is a Jamaican-born British-Australian director and producer of film and television. He directed Predator 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, Blown Away, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Lost in Space and Under Suspicion. He also produced and directed several episodes of the first season of 24.
I wanted to make a film that was sophisticated and emotional, but for a wider audience.
I directed 24's pilot. I felt we should follow the characters around as if we were a documentary crew, using available light, hand-held cameras, split screens, sound that isn't always what it should be, to suit the reality of the premise.
Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.
We shoot double episodes in 15 days in Los Angeles.
Because of all the concurrent stories going in 24 and its fast pace, it can be complicated in terms of the story, so I thought sound could help with the storytelling.
When I was thinking of casting this, I thought, What roles would Sellers be playing now?
I've always been a bit of a sound freak in the movies I've done.
To be able to rely completely on the actors was a very simple process for me.
It's rare that scenes last more than 2 or 3 minutes, so sound helps segue from one scene to another.
I have an adult emotional life and an editing system inside me which prevents me from being preposterously stupid.
Each environment has its own signature. Sound tells a story: You make choices about what you're hearing, where to look, how you want to feel about what's going on.
If people aren't in sync, things won't work out well.
24 isn't like other shows, where you set the look once and you're done. The show started at midnight, then moved to a pre-dawn look, and now we're at dawn and we're warming up the day.
We use a lot of source music on some shows and none on others.
I had a birthday one night on a farm we were shooting on. I walked into the tent, and there were 150 people waiting for me, all wearing masks of my face.
There were no previews; we made the film we wanted to make.
Everyone was going to play their part honestly, and not try and pretend to be good or bad guys.
Dark impulses certainly exist in me and, I think, in most people.
I had no special effects, no monsters running around, nothing blew up; those things are all things I've done so many times that they lose their allure after a while.
There's no attempt to manipulate the audience. We made our choice at the start.
It's been exciting to be able to go forward with stuff without 10,000 people saying, It should be like this.
I believe there's a landscape that exists underneath everything that we can see in present-day stuff. And I think that makes life kind of a detective story.
I've never seen, heard, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn't be talked about. Hell yes, I'm for debating anything!