Just because I hold a shot for more than five seconds and it's all a deliberate tableau, people say it's theater. It's not really. |
Kevin and Annette... I wanted them to do it together. They clearly wanted to work with each other. |
Kurosawa films that are not dialogue-based. |
Now I'm back home, living in London, running my theater. I just want to enjoy all that. |
Obviously, there's a good bit of irony to that scene, ... A lot of what began in that first war (in 1991) can be extrapolated to what we're seeing today. I think those remain issues we should be talking about, even arguing about. |
One movie is only one movie. I want to have a lifetime of making films. |
One of the reasons I loved working with Tom is people feel they know who he is... I think working with an actor who the audience already has a relationship with actually helps you in a film like this. |
People are capable of good and bad. As long as we continue perpetrating these absurd two-dimensional stories that everything is black and white - you're either good or bad - then the longer we'll misunderstand how many interesting stories you can tell in the space that exists between the two. |
So much of what we were trying to do here is to give the lie to the perceived notions of gangster movies, which is difficult, given the fact that we've seen so many of them, brilliantly done and otherwise. |
Story and cutting patterns are sometimes muddled in an audience's mind. This is a lot of story in less than two hours. Because it's not cut fast doesn't mean there's not a lot of story going on. Sometimes there's an impression of a lot happening in a movie, and nothing is actually happening. |
Thank God I don't live in Los Angeles. I think if you're there the whole time it just gets out of proportion and you lose touch completely with reality. |
The bad thing about all this awards stuff is, it pits one film-maker up against another, it pits one movie up against the other. But, the good thing, there's no big movie this year that's gonna blitz everybody. You don't have to see all these movies and debate. And that's great. |
The characters are trapped within the lifestyle. It's about what goes on before the movie starts. |
The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words. |
The nice thing is, because the movie has been a success, there's the occasional party, the occasional premiere, opening. I see a lot of Kevin and Annette. Annette is pregnant so I haven't seen her that much, but Kevin is a one-man publicity machine for this movie. He's unbelievable -- I mean, how does he have the energy? Annette can't really fly, and they just ask her about (her husband) Warren (Beatty) the entire time, but Kevin has been on the campaign trail. |