My favorite film is "Meshes in the Afternoon," a short avant garde film directed by Maya Deren. This was the first film that I saw that was actually directed by a woman.
When I wrote my first film and then directed it and I looked at it for the first time on what's called an assembly, you look at this movie which is every scene you wrote, every line of dialogue you wrote and you want to kill yourself the minute you see it. It's like, 'How did I write something so horrible?'
I don't think there's a part that I've played or something I've written or directed that hasn't smacked of 'The Wizard Of Oz.' It's the film all roads lead to for me.
The first film I directed (Explicit Ills), I did when I was like 27 years old. I had been an actor for a certain amount of time, and then I was like, "I want to start directing."
The influence of John Hughes is fully felt in the melodrama 'Donnie Darko.' This first film written and directed by Richard Kelly is a wobbly cannonball of a movie that tries to go Mr. Hughes one better; it's like a Hughes version of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I remember when I was about 18, Sean Penn made a bet with me. He had just directed his first movie, and he's like, 'By the time you're 30, I will bet you $500 that you'll be sick of acting.' I'm still waiting to collect, because I'm not.
It used to annoy and frustrate me to have to come in and audition. I would say to my agents, 'Haven't they seen this film and this film and this film? They know what I look like... They must.' Until I directed an episode of 'Roswell.' And all of a sudden, I realized why that was such an important thing.
I would love to say something really cool, because I did film studies. So, like, a Jean-Luc Goddard film - something like that. But I genuinely would love to be in 'Titanic.' I'm such a loser. That's, like, my childhood film. Like, I love it.
People use mobile phones in this very distracting environment where you probably don't have time to watch a 30-minute film, but you might have time to look at a film for a minute and learn something you didn't expect while you walk on the streets.
I feel like my timeline has moved so many times in my brain. I used to be like, 'Maybe like 30' because that's when my older sister had her first kid. Now that I'm 30, I'm like, 'I don't want to have a baby in a long time!'
Me and Kirby are very collaborative and it changes from film to film. The first project we worked on together, Derrida, we co-directed. The last film Outrage, I was the producer and he was the director. This film was much more of a collaboration - he is the director and I am the producer - but this is a film by both of us.
When you've written a film and directed it and it comes out exactly as you imagined it, it's pretty boring.
That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.
I spent a long time on my first movie, which was the sequel to a short film that I did called 'Carne.' And I had no money. I shot it over a period of three years, a bit like David Lynch directed 'Eraserhead.'
When I heard about the first Tomb Raider, I was very interested and I would have liked to have directed that. When I was approached for the second film, I was delighted.
My M.F.A was in directing, and all the films I've made, for film school and after, I've written, directed and shot.