At school I was very shy. I wasn’t funny really.
I don’t thrive on control. I’m not looking for control. I think I get better results when I don’t control things.
I like the days when all the filmmakers had was a film roll, a camera and a gangster. The Mack Sennett comedies were all like that. They’d create little teams to go out and shoot films.
I don’t call cut between the takes – it’s my way to help the actor keep focused. As soon as you say ‘cut’ you have 10 people jumping on them and everybody’s trying to do a great job, and they do, but sometimes they forget that the more important thing is the performance, creating the performance.
The problem is, with a lot of children’s films, they are very commercial.
I’m just saying to everyone. The director does not direct the trailer. It’s an edited version that takes so many moments of the movie, sometimes it’s not even in the movie. The director does the movie. So don’t judge the director based on the trailer. Please.
That’s what the internet is: it’s like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It’s like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.
When I shoot actors, I have that dilemma. I want the actor to be good, and sometimes I have to push them to a place that isn’t pleasant. I always think: ‘Is it worth doing for the sake of the movie?’ But I have to remember the bigger picture.
Michael Jackson will always be my favorite pop musician; he was for years and years until his death, which was horrible to me. So I like pop culture. But to me, even if it’s popular, there is a quality in the music you have to be able to appreciate.
People who get to express their voice are paid by the people who make profit from it. So they’re going to make you believe you have to spend your money buying these products otherwise you won’t be happy. This is really wrong. Especially the implication it carries.
The first dolly track was somebody who had the idea to put the camera on a boat on a canal. So the boat would move very slowly but steadily. So they would see all that surrounds you and you’d see the landscape changing slowly. So that was the first time.
You need philosophy. It sounds a little pompous but I think when you direct a film, the only way to find a response to the questions you keep asking yourself is to have a philosophy.
If you’re not grown up enough to understand that a trailer is not done by the director, then fine. Judge the movie from the trailer.
The MTV Video Awards were never about the video, but about the song. Most of the time it was just to glorify people for the wrong reason.
Pop music is created by repression – and then the system takes it and makes even more money with it!
I’ve always loved 3D. In fact, as a kid, I was exposed to 3D at an early age because my grandfather was a specialist of 3D in cinematheques. And then my cousin put it in ‘Science of Sleep’ with toilet paper tube cities. But he was a specialist and I always wanted to do something in 3D.
My grandfather lived across the garden from us, and in his attic he had a lot of radios, appliances and inventions that he had made over 50 years, such as a keyboard called a clavioline, which can be heard on some Beatles songs – it was popular in the 60s. So we had all that at home.
I always wanted to create this community that would come and tell their own story, shoot it – and watch them. The idea is to not have one entity who creates the work, the project, and another entity who consumes it; the idea is people create their own work, like somebody cultivating his garden.
I don’t like the idea of competition – maybe because I kept losing them when I was a kid. Maybe it’s better to be the one who loses?
I’m just thinking of 2001, which I think is the most expensive independent film ever made – which is great, someday I hope I will do one. But I know the parameters when I got onto this project – I have to take care of everyone, make sure that they are all on board, and this process interests me.