I deliberately, in a way, went for something that was a huge challenge and was a big period film. I was excited about the canvas on which I could tell the story as much as the story itself. |
I don't know that people realize we're really at war, ... Or what that does to a soldier. |
I don't think anyone realized how important that war was, |
I don't think good and evil are polarized. |
I don't think of it as a competition - which might surprise you, given the way movies are reported constantly. |
I don't want to tell people what to think about war, ... I just want them to think about it. |
I found that it was one of the things that attracted me [to this project]. It's the idea that you train a huge group of men to go to war, and then what happens when you take away the war, what happens during that period of time, which is really at the center of the movie. They turned on themselves and each other. They create their own wars?All the war literature that I had read had been about combat, and here was a story about there being no combat even though you're trained to kill. |
I froze for a bit, in truth-for about six months after the Oscars... There were lots of scripts landing on my desk. |
I got absolutely everything wrong that first day, you know, and in film, the director is pretty much solely to blame. And in the end, you get what you ask for. If the design is wrong, or costumes or wrong, that's because you've asked for them one day and then the next day you don't like them. |
I kind of forgot that it was Paul Newman. He's a great actor and came to do a job. But when he walked on set, everyone went quiet. Three or four days into the shoot, he arrived. Then you suddenly realize. |
I like throwing snowballs at small children. |
I play a lot of cricket. |
I still can't quite believe it. Although there was something about the fact that it was a first-time writer, a first-time producer, and a first-time director all at the same time. |
I suppose once in a while, a filmmaker makes a movie that's more than just a sum of its parts, more than good acting or good filmmaking. It's something else that has nothing to do with what you've done. This is in 1999, made by people in 1999 for people in 1999 about people in 1999. |
I think I'm going to wait another 20 years to have this happen to me again. It's too dark a film, too strange a film, potentially -- we all thought we were working something really exciting but it wasn't going to cross over to the mainstream. |