- What's the point of being an Australian guy traveling through India if you are going to go to India to meet other Australians?
- I believe that human beings are born first and given passports later. I'm really thankful for my journey. And it's a journey I didn't design.
- The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or a bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.
- Most of cinema nowadays is about shooting a lot and then figuring it out in the cutting room, rather than seeing your film it the head and see what's in your head and not shoot what you have already envisioned in your head.
- When people see some depth you never intended that's really cool, you just put on a face and say "Oh, yeah, that was deep". What are you going to say? I'm just a moron with luck?
- When you work with kids, people tell you to be very delicate, but that's the last thing you should do with kids. They feel patronized if you're like that. They just want you to be normal.
- (Thoughts on the one film (or films) that made him want to become a filmmaker and why): There was no epiphany from one film. There were a few that stood out over the years. I was 8 when I saw Bicycle Thieves (1948), and it was the first black-and-white film I had ever seen. It triggered my curiosity to start seeing European cinema. When I was 7, I saw The Making of 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' (1970). Hearing George Roy Hill talk about all the choices he made, I knew that directing movies was what I wanted to do. I remember seeing Death and Venice 40 times one year, and then switching my allegiance to Godard after seeing Masculine/Feminine! I knew early on that I was a nerd and that films were my refuge. Those first few minutes before the lights went off, and you're alone in the theater waiting, were really pleasurable. Whether it was Steve McQueen, the coolest guy in cinema, to Robert Altman's strange and wonderful 3 Women (1977), I saw hundreds of films before I ever picked up a camera. I believe I took something away from each one.
- There are fewer established rules in the way you tell a story for commercials than in features,it's a great little short story you get to play with.
- If I would rescue one of my movies, it would be A Little Princess.
- [on 'Gravity'] The camera is a third astronaut, and that astronaut is the audience. The audience is floating in space, following these characters who are bonded by the loss of physics in zero gravity, floating and rolling and spinning. The idea is to immerse the audience so that your emotional experience is projected onto the screen in a primal way.
- [on directing 'Gravity'] There were times when it felt as though everything and everyone was conspiring against the process. But the thing about adversities is that they force you out of your comfort zone. The bad outcome is that you might drift into the void, but the other outcome is that you might gain amazing tools for growth and knowledge.
- They ask if I'm happy and elated by 'Gravity's success. For me, it's like the fox who has been chased by hounds for four and a half years, and then the fox gets away. Is the fox happy? The fox is happy when he's frolicking with another fox, playing with the cubs in the meadow, mating, but when he escapes it's just relief. That's not happiness.
- The most important thing for us is that all of this stuff, and all of this technology, are only tools to achieve the cinematic experience and cinematic moment. For us, the conceptual aspect behind it and the theoretical aspect of what we were trying to convey was more important. All of the technology was in service of that.
- [on the physicality of Sandra Bullock's performance] It was more like a dancer really with choreography, because it just wasn't marks, it was about timing. So it was very complex and I'm amazed at what she did.
- Tim [Webber] came to me with the idea 'let's do it mainly CG', and I went 'no way..that's going to suck. We're going to do it as much practical as we can'. So we tried the conventional rigs and stuff. We tried cables and twisted arms and stuff, and I think it was three hours into the first day that it was so obvious that it wouldn't work.. And there's another thing. Wires give you this axis when you're rolling, and we needed several axises, so the wires weren't going to do it.. We wanted to give it a photo-real look from the first minute. I remember saying that when we finished the film I wanted NASA to call us and say they were suing us for putting cameras in their ships.
- [on Roma] What we tried to do is balance between character and a social context as well. Because we're talking about personal scars. That is definitely a period that scarred me, probably for life. I can assume that it scarred the characters that play in the film. But also the social events that were portrayed are one of the most important and deep scars in the Mexican psyche. In the collective consciousness.
- [on Roma] Memory can be subject but it can also be objective. I was interested to observe those moments at a distance without a judging eye, not allowing the camera to interfere.
- [on Roma] When setting up Roma, I wasn't concerned about narrative, I was concerned about memory. I was concerned about spaces, textures, and trusting that all of that together would interweave a narrative by itself...a cinematic narrative.
- [accepting the Critics' Choice Award as Best Picture for "Roma"] This bunch of Mexicans are not as bad as sometimes they are portrayed.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content