I've done really well so far in my career by trusting the audience to be as dissatisfied with convention as I am, as a film-goer. You want to go see a film that surprises you in some way.
For me, as a film goer, I like nothing more than to sit in the cinema, have the lights go down and not know what I'm about to see or unfold on-screen. Every time we go to make a film, we do everything we can to try to systematise things so we're able to make the film in private, so that when it's finished it's up to the audience to make of it what they will.
I'm not a great cinema-goer.
I've always been a sort of goer.
'Toofan Singh' is a Punjabi film based on a terrorist. The Pahlaj led CBFC banned the film because according to them the film glorifies terrorism, and that might give a wrong message to today's youth. However, the film has been released in many countries, and has been received warmly. Unfortunately, it never saw the light of day in India.
There has never been a great film unless it was created in the spirit of the experimental filmmaker.
'Stomp the Yard' was a great film. It was a great film, great opportunity. It's the reason I live in Atlanta to this day, that film. But as far as acting goes, it wasn't very challenging. I played me.
'Alien' is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think.
While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.
I'd never read 'Prince Caspian'. I watched it and loved that film. Everybody was talking about its lack of success; its relative success in comparison to the other film. It's a great film. It deserved to do a lot better than it did. It's very difficult to make a film that will match up to the first.
You will never see'Altman's Great Film of the Seventies: The Director's Cut' because you have never seen a film of mine that wasn't the director's cut. I have never permitted it.
If there had never been the Great Migration there would never have been jazz, there would never have been Michelle Obama. A lot of amazing black people exist in this country because of the Great Migration. That's nation-building.
Well cult is a word you would never say in Hollywood. In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, "Oh, my last film was a cult film." I'd say, "Oh great, well I hope this one isn't!"
With the right movie, 3D can enhance the experience. Absolutely, it can make a good film a great film. It can make a great film a really amazing film to see .
Our biggest art forms are film and television, and there hasn't been a great film about 9/11 yet, nor has there been a great television series. Something like The Wire gives us a rich and fully achieved picture of the wasteful, cruel War on Drugs; something like The White Ribbon gives a perspective on World War I that could only have been presented long after the event itself.
I want to reach out and entertain people. I want people to come to a museum that have never been in a museum before. I want also to have enough art references in it that would satisfy the most sophisticated museum goer.