A Quote by Lauren Shuler Donner
My mandate to myself since I've been involved in these movies was 'make every single movie different, so there's never 'X-Men' fatigue.'
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I have been involved with theatre since I was 13. I never seriously thought I would get into movies though I had every intention of continuing with theatre.
People seem to think that my movies are so carefully coordinated and arranged - and in a lot of ways, they are - but every single time I make a movie, I feel that every director makes these choices. You make choices about your script, you make choices about your actors, and how you're going to stage it, and how you're going to shoot it, and what the costumes are going to be like, and in every single detail, you make that decision. And for me, what ends up happening is, I wind up surprised at the combination of all these ingredients. It never is anything like what I expected.
Every movie, especially when you get involved... takes something out of you. You learn something, but you give something to the movie. And after the movie, if the experience has been intense and a true experience, you're a little different afterward.
Years ago I was in a band called Two Lane Blacktop - we deliberately named ourselves after the 'Two-Lane Blacktop' movie, 'cuz it's a car chase movie. All our songs were based on movies, every single song. I love movies, and that was something that me and the singer in Two Lane Blacktop bonded over - we were design students together, we did a film-class together, so we became obsessed with movies. It's followed me around ever since then, it's a constant theme.
I make movies for my needs. My goal has never, never, never been to make shocking movie.
I have been recording every single one of my shows since 1994. Every single joke I've ever done is on a hard drive. I can tell you when I wrote every joke I wrote. I can tell you the first time I said it, when I made it different, when I made it better.
I think every movie I've made after 'Indiana Jones,' I've tried to make every single movie as if it was made by a different director, because I'm very conscious of not wanting to impose a consistent style on subject matter that is not necessarily suited to that style. So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject.
I was never a critic. I was a journalist and wrote about filmmakers, but I didn't review movies per se. I make that distinction only because I came to it strictly as someone who was just a lover of storytellers and cinematic storytellers. And I still am. I'm still a great movie fan, and I ,that love of movies is very much alive in me. I approach the movies I make as a movie-lover as much as a movie-maker.
I've kept the people who've been in my career who I feel are my family. Kathy [Kennedy] had been with me since 1978. Janusz Kaminsky, my cinematographer, has made every movie with me since Schindler's List. Michael Kahn has cut every movie I've directed since 1976 when we made Close Encounters together. Rick Carter has done more than 15 of my directed films as a production designer.
We're all so jaded. We've seen so many movies. We know what's going to happen in every single movie. I mean, there are some movies where I'm like why do I even need to keep watching? And so, if you can make a movie in which you're completely surprising the audience left and right, and left and right, then you've won. If a jaded film critic or reporter or an audience is like, "I didn't see that one coming," that to me is like a victory.
Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don't understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men's skills are single.
Having come up in the era where movies are only movies if they're released in the theater... I don't know if that holds true anymore. I've been involved in some movies that have gone 'direct-to-video,' and that used to not be a good thing, but now it's different.
Actors can make five movies a year. A director can make one movie, every two years. It's a whole different level of commitment and of sweat equity, and therefore there's a direct correlation to passion.
There are some filmmakers like the Coen brothers that are very precise. They make shooting boards, they do it shot by shot, and they follow every single line in their own script. They make amazing movies, and I admire them so much, but I can't do that. I have no idea how the movie will exactly be. While shooting, I just try to create an accident that I don't control very well - grabbing things from different sources and ideas, and then having a sensation somewhere that it will make sense.
In a way, the truth is that I was dreaming to do a movie in the United States just because, as a filmmaker, I always loved the idea of trying to make movies in a different culture, in a different way. It's always interesting to make a movie abroad.
It really has been a blessing because you can go and look at our other movies we've done in a studio system. We didn't get to make the movie that we wanted to make. We made the movie that someone else wanted us to make. That can be a little disheartening, a lot disheartening. While there have been struggles, it doesn't matter which table you're at because you're going to have obstacles, but I kind of like being able to make the movie that you want to make.
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