I wanted to do a naval film and I flirted with different ideas, most of which ended up being too intense. So when the idea of 'Battleship' was first suggested, I was instantly drawn to the challenge - could I invent a movie around the idea of five ships fighting five ships?
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
The Battle for the Philippines was the greatest naval battle in history, judged in terms of the number of ships taking part, the number of ships sunk, and the importance of its outcome. It included every form of naval warfare of the 20th century: gunnery duels between battleships; destroyer battles at night and by day, as ferocious and sustained as any at the Battle of Jutland; submarines that stalked the depths; sinking many ships; and finally, carrier warfare on a scale never dreamed of even by the most ardent enthusiasts of air warfare at sea.
I had a lot of things I wanted to do... I want to be a teacher...I also want to be an astronaut...and also make my own cake shop...I want to go to the sweets bakery and say "I want one of everything", ohhhh I wish I could live life five times over...Then I'd be born in five different places, and I'd stuff myself with different food from around the world...I'd live five different lives with five different occupations...and then, for those five times...I'd fall in love with the same person.
The very first idea I ever had about making a film... my first thought about ever being a filmmaker was when I was sixteen years old and I wanted to make a Viking movie. And I wanted to make it in old Norse, which I was studying at the time. It's odd because at that age that's a stupidly ridiculous idea 'cause how will I ever be a filmmaker.
There are silver ships
There are gold ships,
But there are no ships
Like friendships.
I hated the idea that I would be like my father. Which is one of the reasons I decided I didn't want to be a writer and wanted to be an actor instead. I wanted to go in a total different direction. But, of course, I ended up being a writer anyway.
The real truth - like anything, you have an idea about something you might write and it changes. People reflect on it or you get other ideas and maybe your original idea is radically different than how it ends up being. It's not a theorem. You don't sit down and prove something. You start with an initial idea and it grows and grows. The math of the narrative changes. In some ways your original document and what the film ends up being are quite different.
In 2007 and 2008, the first two Danish ships were hijacked. I started to research it. I've had the idea of writing in this arena for a long time, but I could never find the angle of what kind of story.
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.
Ninety-five per cent of films are born of frustration, of self despair, of ambition for survival, for money, for fattening bank accounts. Five per cent, maybe less, are made because a man has an idea, an idea which he must express.
I had an idea that I wanted show which would keep me happy for five years. I tried to figure how I'd feel if I had to do the part for five years. This one 'Hogan's Heroes' filled the bill.
Personally, it doesn't matter to me if I had the worst career stats in N.B.A. history as long as I got my 'ships. The 'ships, it shuts everything up.
Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.
I went to the top of the mountain in television and could do anything I wanted, but I wanted to do an independent film, which results in you paying your own way, fighting like hell to get distribution, and maybe 30 people will see it. That was a good idea.
Every suggested idea produces a corresponding physical reaction. Every idea constantly repeated ends by being engraved upon the brain, provoking the act which corresponds to that idea.