The term ‘genre’ eventually becomes pejorative because you’re referring to something that’s so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.
As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.
I never considered myself a lucky person. I’m the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.
I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.
When you’re dealing with the world of dreams, the psyche, and potential of a human mind, there has to be emotional stakes. You have to deal with issues of memory and desire.
Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.
Sometime, when you start thinking too much what an audience is going to think, when you’re too self-conscious about it, you make mistakes.
Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.
You always have to be very aware that the audience is extremely ruthless in its demand for newness, novelty and freshness.
I think audiences get too comfortable and familiar in today’s movies. They believe everything they’re hearing and seeing. I like to shake that up.
I’ve always believed that if you want to really try and make a great film, not a good film, but a great film, you have to take a lot of risks.
A hero can be anyone, even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat on a young boy’s shoulders to let him know the world hadn’t ended.
I made ‘Batman’ the way I made every other film, and I’ve done it to my own satisfaction – because the film, truly, is exactly the way I wanted it to be.
My approach with actors is to try and give them whatever it is they need from me. Direction to me is about listening and responding and realizing how much they need to know from me and how much they have figured out for themselves, really.
People want to see something that shows them you can do what you say. That’s the trick.
I try to be as efficient as possible because in my process, I think that actually helps the work. I like having the pressure of time and money and really trying to stick to the parameters we’ve been given.
Film is the best way to capture an image and project that image. It just is, hands down.
By the time I was 10 or 11, I knew I wanted to make films.
But, in each case, as a filmmaker who’s been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.
I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. ‘Alien,’ ‘Blade Runner’ just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.