A Quote by William Beckett

I like films that go a little more daring visually, and story-based stuff that usually reflects pretty closely to what real life is. — © William Beckett
I like films that go a little more daring visually, and story-based stuff that usually reflects pretty closely to what real life is.
I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.
The beauty of my job is I do all different kinds of film directing, not just surf films anymore. And I do stuff from commercials to short films to working on feature films, and none of it is based from where I live. It's all based elsewhere, so I can live anywhere and commute to where I need to go.
When you're traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I've met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.
I love photo shoots where I can be like a pinup, not myself. Where I can be feminine, glamorous, dark not like in real life. I hate it when you go in and they want you to be 'natural,' to be yourself. I just hate it. I love having fun. When they ask you to smile, I hate it. Of course I smile in my real life, but to do it on cue, that's not spontaneous. I'd rather do something that's like a little movie, like a little story, rather than just me, I feel naked.
The films I do always have a happy ending. I hope it reflects back to real life.
Guys like Spielberg and Zemeckis and really anybody who is a storyteller-filmmaker today has studied Hitchcock and the way he visually tells a story. He was the master of suspense, certainly, but visually you would get a lot of information from what he would do with the camera and what he would allow you to see as the story was unfolding.
Visually, I want to try everything. But I believe that every shot of my films really expresses what I think about the story and the character. The most important thing is the story, not the images.
If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
In my youth, cinemas showed two films in one day. I used to watch both of them. It may sound strange, but 'West Side Story' was the only musical I liked. I didn't like musicals, or films with songs, at all. I always thought they were not real, that the songs sounded a little bit false. But in the case of 'West Side Story,' things were different.
I haven't really done a whole lot of daring stuff. Like when I go snowboarding, I don't go in the terrain park.
I've always been into 'fast-paced, don't bore 'em, keep it moving along, stick with the story.' You know: tell a story the way I want to hear a story. I find it more rewarding to write for kids, but I also find it a little easier, because you can just let loose a little bit more in terms of fantasy and stuff.
I don't happen to like pretty things. I don't like pretty dresses. I like more attractive. I like people that look a little bit more offbeat. I don't like the classic pretty face. That doesn't mean it's not pretty or it's not wonderful, and most people don't agree with me, but that's the way I think.
More than conventional picture books, the notebook format allows me to leap from words to images, and this free-flowing back-and-forth inspires my best work. It reflects the way I think - sometimes visually, sometimes verbally - with the pictures not there just to illustrate the text but to replace it, to tell their own story.
That story about the two women in my life is - a lot of people get upset, a lot of people question it. Steven Soderbergh said to me, "The story of your life is incredible. The real story of your life that's interesting, more interesting than all the other stuff - the franchises, the movies, the songs, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra - the real thing that's interesting and unbelievable is the relationship with these two women. And if you're willing to put that out there, you know then, you're going to have a great movie. Because that's the movie."
War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.
I'm pretty optimistic that in the future these kind of films will also be part of the main categories, perhaps not in a foreign language, but certainly more socially and politically engaged films, or films that will happen where the story takes place outside the United States.
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