Working with kids is usually very fun. They get so into movie and they’re up for anything. Usually they’re having such an exciting experience, everybody feels that.
What happened to your hand? It got hit by a mirror. How’d that happen? I lost my temper at myself.
With each movie I have a different set of inspirations.
I love working with actors. That’s what the set really is, for me. It’s my time with the actors.
I don’t think any of us are normal people.
I would like to do a movie in space, but I think it would be difficult to do it on location.
You don’t do background music the way a lot of more conventional films do. The music is often kind of a character in your films to the extent that sometimes you stop and watch someone perform a song.
I don’t really look for challenges as much as I like adventures. Other than that I’m just trying to find stories I want to tell.
I don’t know what is in store for the movie business any better than anybody else does, but it does seem like my kind of movies are a little trickier than it used to be – or maybe a lot trickier.
I guess when I think about it, one of the things I like to dramatise, and what is sometimes funny, is someone coming unglued. I don’t consider myself someone who is making the argument that I support these choices. I just think it can be funny.
Sometimes if the people are up for trying something that I’m interested in, it can be a great experience.
When I see the first dailies on any movie, I usually feel that I had no idea how this combination of ingredients was going to mix together, what it was going to produce.
I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly bothered or obsessed with detail.
Kids are always open to anything. It’s very rare that a kid isn’t extremely eager to make you happy.
On Fantastic Mr. Fox, I got used to working with animated storyboards as a way of planning for the shoot. We did a lot of sequences that way with this movie. Partly as a result of that, I decided to build more sets in order to do certain shots.
I’ve never had a movie that got great reviews. I’ve had movies that got different levels of good and bad reviews, but you can more or less count on plenty of bad reviews.
Sometimes when you’re editing a movie, you have the thing that you don’t expect – which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.
India is a place where one of the great pleasures for a foreigner is that you’re constantly surprised. Everywhere you look is something that is either funny, or very moving, but there is always so much that is so unexpected. That’s part of the reason why people who like it tend to love it.
Usually when I’m making a movie, what I have in mind first, for the visuals, is how we can stage the scenes to bring them more to life in the most interesting way, and then how we can make a world for the story that the audience hasn’t quite been in before.
I didn’t think so much of him at first. But now I get it: he’s everything that I’m not.