Honestly, I don't go out of my way to see animated movies. I'm mostly influenced by.. the films I tend to like are the small films, small personal stories. With characters you can believe.
My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'
I was inspired by Maya Deren because she was the first woman filmmaker whose films I saw. I also loved Fellini and Goddard because they were so different from Hollywood films. But when I saw the cinema verite films that were made by Drew Associates with Leacock and Pennebaker I found my passion.
I personally just want to do as many different things as I can do, whether it's comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, narrator... You've got a documentary, I've got a voice. Animated films. Big films, small films.
When me and my sister were toddlers, it was 'The Jungle Book' literally every day. If it was lunchtime, it was 'Jungle Book' time.
American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.
I do think that animated films have the ability to touch you someplace. There is something about live action movies that is different because we know the characters are real people, so they always stay flawed for us somehow. But animated films touch us in a very clear, uncomplicated place. They have that ability. And an animated character can make an expression in a way humans can't do.
Nagpur was a very small town. There was no exposure to different kinds of films or world cinema. Only Manmohan Desai films.
My first movie I saw when I was a kid was 'The Jungle Book.' I was 5 years old, and I saw it in a movie theater. Seeing that movie really lit the fuse and ignited my passion for animation.
I am Tarzan of the Apes. I want you. I am yours. You are mine. We live here together always in my house. I will bring you the best of fruits, the tenderest deer, the finest meats that roam the jungle. I will hunt for you. I am the greatest of the jungle fighters. I will fight for you. I am the mightiest of the jungle fighters. You are Jane Porter, I saw it in your letter. When you see this you will know that it is for you and that Tarzan of the Apes loves you.
I'm a huge fan of the animated film 'The Land Before Time' and that was one of my favourite animated films when I was growing up.
Basically, I have always wanted to have an art-house cinema. A cinema where we can show films that are not necessarily the current offerings on circuit and films that are not commercial.
The second-grade films - where are they? No more are they made, and yet they were by far the best films for holding hands at, and wasn't this always the main purpose of the cinema?
The third line of cinema today is neither art nor commercial but categorized as good and bad cinema. I think two films - 'Main, Meri patni aur Who' and 'Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon' were the base films for this new line of cinema.
Some of these things I saw in foreign films - African films, Cuban films - long before I decided to really go on this course as an actor. I started to think about what values I saw in those films that I wanted to bring to my projects
Some of these things I saw in foreign films - African films, Cuban films - long before I decided to really go on this course as an actor. I started to think about what values I saw in those films that I wanted to bring to my projects.