Quotes

Hitchcock had to fight to the death to make his movies.

I just like movies that somehow expose the world in a way that's different than you imagine it.

I get very driven by certain themes and ideas.

Certain remakes are great. [John] Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is better than the original.

My favorite favorites are people like Bunuel, Fellini and Charlie Chaplin.

But it is funny, because I saw Unbreakable recently and it's a strange movie, I didn't mind it, and it's got some interesting things going on.

Coppola has problems getting financing, so why should I not have problems getting financing.

I direct a lot of TV commercials and music videos.

I really love sort of classical cinema where people were telling stories with very little dialogue, and people were using the camera in a really interesting way.

I actually did use to sell shoes.

I think movies are good for getting into dream states or exploring weird alternate states of thinking.

I'm not trying to be some kind of underground renegade.

I'm one of the few people who really like Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.

I think filmmakers want their movies to be seen.

Same thing, like my commercials are often times really funny because I tend to find 30 seconds is a really good amount of time to tell a joke.

It's hard for a hit to be bad for your career.

I'm really influenced by so many different things.

After living in LA for 8 years, I sort of wanted a change, but there's not much production in New York, which is where I primarily live, so I just sort of drifted over to London.

They're innocent movies, and they're fun movies and there were no pretensions about 'em.

The thing about movies these days is that the commerce end of it is so inflated and financiers are just expecting this enormous return on their investment.

That's kind of the weird thing that M. Night Shyamalan has sort of unleashed upon the world is this need for every movie to have these ridiculous endings.

I'm not saying it isn't frustrating that my films haven't gotten a bigger release, but I'm really happy with them and if you just keep cranking and eventually, if you have a certain sensibility, some of your movies will hit and some just won't.

Like I said about Freaked (1993), people tend to find these films, and I think that in the end the cool thing about a movie is that it can be sort of burnt temporarily, but then it's burnt into the fabric of your culture.

The film, even when we were making it in that budget range, which was really a coup - we got it made because we pitched it to the studio head, Joe Roth.

The thing is there have been American movies that are similar to Solaris (1972), like Alien (1979) had a lot of things that are similar, although it's also got the horror element.

With Fever (1999), the film was so made for the screen, and there's so much surround sound that was done for the film - enormous detail paid to that. I wasn't thinking video, because I didn't know how it was going to turn out.

The trick of making movies in this culture is how to not give up everything that makes them worthwhile in order to get them made - and that's a tricky balance.