I watched films growing up, but no more than the next guy, really. Working on 'Hugo' made me appreciate cinema and the art of cinema a lot more.
Actually I don't watch a lot of films but when I do, I like experimental, avant garde, European and world cinema. That is the language of cinema I am drawn towards. I don't watch much Hollywood or Bollywood.
My mother is a very big cinema buff, so as a kid, we watched a lot of Indian and Malay films.
My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby - but just me. Nobody else.
I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.
I grew up in a very music-loving home with a lot of records, a lot of TV, a lot of radio, a lot of video - VHS cinema, basically.
Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.
For a long time I have compared cinema to music, I think cinema has a lot to do with the rhythm of music.
I have been brought up watching world cinema, and I have travelled a lot, so I am very comfortable with my body.
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.
My sense of cinema improved slowly as I started watching South cinema, got to know that cinema is much appreciated here.
Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.
My cinema - the '50s, '60s - is different from the cinema today so I thought that it would not be bad to show that kind of cinema where we could dream.
Basically, I was a very serious film fan. I watched a lot of cinema and contemporary and European film.
What I'm really trying to do is recreate classic Hollywood cinema and classic genre cinema from a woman's point of view. Because most cinema is really made for men, how can you create cinema that's for women without having it be relegated to a ghetto of "chick flick" or something like that?
There is more to Indian cinema than just Bollywood. I think regional cinema, especially Tamil and Marathi cinema are exploring some really bold themes.