American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.
French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.
. . . it is true that language and forward movement in the cinema are jolly hard to reconcile. It's a very, very, difficult thing to do. . . . There is still a place in the cinema for movies that are driven by the human face, and not by explosions and cars and guns and action sequences . . . there's such a thing as action and speed within thought rather than within a ceaseless milkshake of images.
The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised.
Everything today is such a massive visual show. It's very rare to get a film where the characters are raw and real - and you can take people back to where they are watching live cinema. With character-driven action. Not visual-driven action.
I like action movies, even though I think action movies are kind of derided now. But there is something extraordinary about action movies, which is absolutely linked to the invention of cinema and what cinema is and why we love it.
I'm not a fan of action movies. I don't watch many action movies, I don't have a lot of references except for 70s action movies or cinema noir.
When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
For me, there's cinema, which I love and would fight for, and then there's also entertainment, and I see them as very, very different. But sure, I'd love to do a blockbuster. I can't wait for someone to tell me, 'Explosion, run!'
In the Premier League it is difficult, the midfield is very congested; there is a lot of pressure and the game is very fast. So it's hard for you to spend a lot of time with the ball; you have to be very fast, you have to think long before the ball reaches you.
I use a lot of narration; I have a very prosaic style. I like to get you invested in the character first and do a lot of work in the first pages of each issue to try to re-establish things and keep the symbolism of a story very tucked beneath the surface.
My sister and I had jointly heard the narration of 'Revolver Rani' in Tigmanshu Dhulia's office. After hearing the narration, my sister was very scared and adamant that I should not do this film, as my character was twisted, neurotic, violent and abusive.
I think, for an actor, the whole world is a place of work because if you focus on characters and on stories, they are everywhere, so yeah, I feel very privileged to have had this great opportunities in the international cinema and especially in the American cinema.
I would tend to be drawn to independent cinema as a viewer, probably more than the big blockbuster.
Dibakar and Shekhar have the vision that we would associate with European cinema. They leave their actors on their own to give a personal narration on the screen.
For years, Blockbuster Video has edited movies. Like The Bad Lieutenant, when he's masturbating while the girls in the car are doing the thing. I rented it from Blockbuster and sped to that scene, and it was gone. I called up Blockbuster, and I'm like, "I got an erection, and the scene's not there."