A Quote by James Wan

All my movies are about people with some ideology, but guess what? It never works out. — © James Wan
All my movies are about people with some ideology, but guess what? It never works out.
Whatseems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, 'I am ideological.'
First, I would say, is ideology. I have never spoken to any member of these groups, not just ISIS, but also Al Qaeda, Shabab, etc., who wasn't driven by the ideology. Beyond that, a lot of people are wounded in some way - they've fallen out of society in some manner. All of the ones I've spoken to seem to have veered off course from lives we consider acceptable and successful. Of course, there are others like Osama bin Laden, who was a wealthy and successful businessperson.
If you go to Sundance, the experience that I've had there as a viewer is... there's like a hundred movies there, and you've got to figure out what movies are sold out, what can you see. Sometimes you go to see movies that you don't know anything about because it just works into your schedule.
I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture. It's one thing to mess stuff up and break stuff, but [Borat] is really pointing out the ideology of America. It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.
There's somewhat of a real fascination with American bands and American mythology in London, so I think we've tapped into some of that. Maybe because of the way the press works or whatever, they have extremely knowledgeable music fans over there. People who will sit there and talk to you about some record that came out in 1967 out of Memphis that you've never heard before.
Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.
'Tax Collector' was optioned for a series with F/X, but it never happened. I guess they ran into a problem trying to figure out why someone would tune in to watch a show about a guy who works for the IRS.
The movies I've done with Wes [Anderson] have a much different quality than some of the more broad comedies. But what is interesting is how many sequels I've done. I've worked with Ben [Stiller] a million times now, and this is yet another sequel we're doing. I guess we're lucky to be in some movies that people wanted to see again.
I don't like to guess. Just react. Some guys are guess hitters. I just could never do it. If you guess and guess wrong, you have no shot of hitting anything else.
If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago.
When I have a chance to make some movies, I am 200 percent to concentrate about my works.
I'm an actor. And I guess I've done so many movies I've achieved some high visibility. But a star? I guess I still think of myself as kind of a worker ant.
I don't set out to make movies about famous people, though I guess I have. I think what I set out to do is to try to understand things that we don't understand. Or to find out what is blocking us from understanding things we should understand.
People love to talk about how the '70s are the only time they made movies about characters, and adult movies, and complicated people. But in the '80s, they got away with some of those too.
To me, real comedy comes out of behavior. It's the choices you make as an actor. It's never about, "I want to do a comedy script." I can't think of it that way. And besides, some of those movies, those comedy movies, I can't even watch them.
I guess a lot of things I make are relationship movies. Maybe all movies are relationship movies, because they're all about how we relate to each other.
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