People want to know if I have a moral standpoint that they should be picking up on, and the truth is, I don’t. I don’t want people to think that I’m trying to tell them to feel a certain way. I think that’s cheap filmmaking.
Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.
I think it’s a mistake for young filmmakers to just buy digital equipment and shoot a feature. Make short films first, make your mistakes and learn from them.
Most people see a documentary about the meat industry and then they become a vegetarian for a week.
Comedy and horror are cousins; they’re related. They both come from storytellers who want to specifically affect the audience and elicit specific reactions during the movie.
I went to college, I went pre-med, I thought I was going to be a doctor.
I’m a kind of private guy.
I’ve always had an underdog perspective.
It’s funny, I can sit through the worst horror film ever made but even a quite good romantic comedy can drive me nuts.
My writing voice is very much like ‘Thank You for Smoking.’ It’s a guy’s voice. It’s very masculine.
Really, it’s the director’s job to disappear and allow the movie to just feel.
There are only so many movies you can direct. And yet there are movies that I want to make sure make it to the screen in as honest a way as possible.
Each one of my films is personal; each one of my films is emotionally autobiographical. And I like directors who do that.
The first set I remember was ‘Ghostbusters.’ It was a scene in which the street erupted. I remember even at seven years old thinking, ‘Wow, if you direct a movie, you can break the streets of New York.’
I’m not going to have a perfect career. It’s better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.
I’m a believer that people need to understand that filmmaking is not a perfect process for anybody. It is a process in which you find the film and the film finds you. And that is every film.
I want my movies to be audience experiences. As much as I like Michael Haneke, I’m not going to make a Haneke film. That’s just not in my DNA.
I think, through comedy, sometimes we’re allowed to discuss things that you’d never be able to talk about in a drama.
I’m equally guilty of using technology – I Twitter, I text people, I chat. But I think there’s something strangely insidious about it that it makes us think we’re closer when in fact we’re not seeing each other, we’re not connecting.
Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood – all those things feel really true to me.