I made this movie for $40,000, which was this little black-and-white horror film called Dementia 13, which we made in about nine days.
I hadn't been there [Comic-Con] before. It's pretty eye-opening, when you haven't been there, just with the sheer amount of fans that are there for different shows and films. It's like a big fan symposium, in a way, as well a way for film studios and television studios to really promote their product to their loyal audience base. It was an experience.
I love the idea of longevity in this career. But [producing] is not about, "Let me do this because this might happen 20 years down the line. " Sleepwalking wasn't a vehicle for me, it was a film that pushed the envelope. I want to produce good stories, versus creating a niche where I can look after myself as an actor.
I come from a family where my father is a filmmaker and professor of film.
If you can't categorize a film for a studio, it's really difficult for them to wrap their heads around it and give you the money.
A dirty word in the film business right now is intelligence.
Films are amazing. To be a part of a movie is the greatest. It's so historic and exciting.
Ask anyone who makes a full-length movie that's shown in the art world if they'd rather have a career as a film director or as an artist. Invariably, they'd rather be known as a film director, because that's what they are. But there's not really a system of independent distribution anymore that allows for that, and so the art world has kind of become all-enveloping. It's absorbed all of these disciplines that don't have a home anymore.
I was doing the promotion for Moon in LA at the same time that Tony Scott was there with [The Taking of] Pelham 123. But obviously he was so concentrating on his own film that he didn't even know I was doing a feature film.
When I met David Green at film school he always used to offer free haircuts - he was kind of an artisan. In a lot of our films, he's constantly trying to give me weird looks.
You know, the technology was at the right place for us to build this world. The most difficult thing about doing The Croods was no doubt the building of the world. Every single thing in this film is organic. Organic things are tough. Very very labour intensive. And we have no man-made structures. You could argue that everything in this film is really an exterior. Even the interiors of the cave are exteriors. So building this world was the biggest thing of all, and the technology was there to do it.
Maybe Putin wanted to fire Medvedev , but how is he supposed to do that after my film?
I'm having a vacation, and it's so beautiful, and maybe I'll never get another film idea in my life.
[When] Johnny Mnemonic was coming out and I realized that all the kids that worked in 7-11 knew more - or thought they knew more - about feature film production than I did. And that was from reading Premiere, that was from this change that came from magazines that treat their readers as players. Magazines that purport to sell you the inside experience.
Music and film are inseparable. They always have been and always will be.
I love con-men characters in film.
A film has its own life and takes its own time.
My ideal role would be the lead in a film with a director that I really appreciate and admire.
It was a film [The Lost World], and it's a sequel at the same time. The first shot on the first day was from the sequel to the movie they hadn't made yet. But yeah, it was a pretty amazing experience running around the jungle for that.
Everybody puts importance in money on a film set.