The luxury that I have is I'm not career-minded, I just live from one film to the next. For a time, I was making documentaries, and all my documentaries were winning awards and stuff, and then I lost interest in documentaries.
Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.
I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something's going on, somebody's going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.
I don't think there's so much difference between making documentaries and feature films. I think it's even harder to make documentaries.
We must learn the correct lessons from the U.S. war on terror, which, far from making the U.S., its citizens and interests safe across the world has only increased insecurity worldwide and has led to many more terror attacks on U.S. interests and citizens across the world.
Life on the planet and in our galaxy is so complex, I don't hope to have any substantial effect in it, but if I can touch a few people deep in their psyche, by making my personal subjective journey concrete for others, then I am very happy.
I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in.
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
"I think I know the real reason." "Which is?" "Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?" He knocked the glass on the table. "Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol." He drank from the glass. "Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol."
Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it.
My documentaries have always been very much constructed in the spirit of dominant cinema. From the time I started making non-fiction, I was mainly interested in designing and creating documentaries like fiction, so it was a natural evolution to try and embark on doing a dramatic narrative.
When I first started, I saw myself shooting documentaries or making documentaries, which is what I did, mostly, for a number of years. So it was quite a surprise how I found myself shooting features. It was like my wildest dreams as a kid collided.
I'm not one of those people who sees documentaries as a stepping stone to doing fiction. I love documentaries and watch tons of documentaries. But, I like fiction films a lot, too.
The trend for documentaries will never go away, because everybody wants to learn about the world. The world is awful in parts, but there's always going to be briliant documentaries about it, and there's always going to be people who want to see them.
I always wanted to go to Cuba growing up. It was this fascinating, forbidden country that seemed to have a lot of politics and folklore and history behind it.
I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.