I have my ideas of what a good documentary is but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.
I'm not being analytical. I just create everything intuitively. If you're too analytical what you're doing probably ends up being too specific.
In high school I read 'Silas Marner' and I was very attracted to this character - he was very rundown and he'd just stop and things would happen around him.
I've always been attracted to temporary families.
My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me.
There is a way that a younger person can accept the inevitable problem that they're going to die whereas somebody a little bit older might be overcome.
Casting the locals is my primary concern because all the other things you assume will be manageable.
There is a common theme though in the stories I have told which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.
The area of teenage life is not necessarily rarefied; we've all gone through that period. It's not as rarefied as a western or a space adventure or a gangster film but it has its own dynamic.
My department is to get actors to do stuff.
Sometimes the people who are helping you can drop the ball.
A person's sexuality is so much more than one word "gay." No one refers to anyone as just "hetero" because that doesn't say anything. Sexual identity is broader than a label.
For all the boredom the straight life brings it's not too bad.
I think that in some cases I've made films that have a sentimental quality at least as part of the film.
If you put up posters around town for high-school kids high-school kids will come. If you're casting politicians you can't put up posters and have politicians come down.
Yeah I try to be really calm.
Everything's changing so fast that it's sometimes hard to keep up.
Usually when I read something first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.
Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think you only get to receive information.
And Later I Thought I Can't Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.
If a movie isn't released it's one thing but if you know it will be it's nice to have closure and see it come out.
The dark comedies tend to be in a non-releasable area. There can be romantic comedies. There can be dramas. But there's no 'dark comedy' inbox for the advertising.
I had wanted to do a comedy.
I'm usually trying to react to what the actors are coming up with. And then the environment and then the story.
If Im diagnosed with cancer I might become despondent but someone young might not and they might need connections with somebody outside their circle of family because their family is so despondent.
No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high.
Death Valley is really wide-open - it's bigger than Rhode Island - and it's less a part of California than an ungoverned territory so there's lots of weird cops-and-robbers stuff going on.
Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot you still can't. It's still your own film.
Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online.
Well I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style ever since I started in the '80s.
I'm a junkie. I like drugs I like the whole lifestyle but it just didn't pay off.
I was once a shameless full-time dope fiend.
When you're on a film and you're doubting something it's usually because you don't think the audience is going to like it.
I'm normally drawn to something I haven't done and seen before.
I was originally a painter and I made films sort of as an extension of that and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.
Even when you're making a movie about life death is a presence and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly. Maybe I'm drawn to it as a story element.
Even when you're making a movie about life death is a presence and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly.
As I do with most films I try and find some music that you could use throughout not just a sampling of lots of different artists.
If it were up to the executives they probably wouldn't have directors at all.
I'd come into filmmaking as a painter so for me making 'Good Will Hunting' was experimental because I didn't know how to do it.
The media has gone through lots of things that make it a less foreign thing to have your lead character be gay.
Because I didn't have brothers I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family so I became one of them - but it was not my family.
When you get to be 23 24 or 25 you start to freeze up and become an adult.
Free time keeps me going.
Wong Kar-Wai is a really great inspiration. He's always referred to as the Jimi Hendrix of filmmaking.
I'm going in a really weird I-don't-know-where direction but I prefer anything [different] from how standardized filmmaking has become.
The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in because you can never really get it right you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.
Sometimes getting upset with yourself is necessary when you face the truth.
If you don't have the story and the unfolding of the trajectory of the saga it's like getting in a car and not having any gas.
There are all kinds of ways that people present their films but that's kind of a good feeling if you can make it seem like the characters are really there.
I used to take photographs just to remember people.
I mean I think I'm pretty sentimental.
I'm thinking of remaking 'Psycho' again. Doing a third remake. The idea this time is to really change it - we're talking about doing a punk rocker setting.