I wanted to do 'Manzanar' because I'd never done anything like it before. The spoken word there is between a drama and an essay, and I'd never worked in concert with an orchestra.
'Survivor' was, to me, an absolute reaction that the audience was having to the sort of staid nature of narrative drama on television.
In studio films, everything has to be boxed in, everybody needs to know beforehand - this is comedy, this is sci-fi, this is drama - and what's the point of independent film if you don't get to experiment?
'Piku' was driven by subtleties. Most films come with the padding of the sound, the visual, the drama.
I'm not a drama person, but when you can make a movie in song form in three-and-a-half minutes, it's surreal.
I used to want to be in 'Downton' because I had never been in a period drama, but then I did 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' and had to wear one of those frocks and... I didn't feel very comfortable.
When I came out of drama school, I was in a shared house in Sydney.
I don't normally make documentaries. I'm a drama director. I've made a few short docs, but I don't like talking heads or 'voice of God' narrators.
'So Much More Than This' is about just getting tangled up in all of the drama and stuff that really does not matter and probably won't matter in, like, three months.
In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage.
John Kerry wants to be the hero in his own drama. He likes King Arthur and the Round Table. He likes the young swashbuckling Churchill, and he loved the early antics of Theodore Roosevelt.
In high drama or high tragedy or anything, it's not really human unless there's some humor at the same time. And vice versa. So I guess I tend to gravitate towards projects which tread a dodgy tightrope between two things, which aren't really one or another.
I've been bouncing around from comedy to drama and TV and film.
The rush into scripted video by tech giants is going to accelerate an evolution of entertainment that's already underway. We're already moving away from the idea that drama is a 60-minute exercise with four bathroom breaks.
We grew up as kids watching those movies and we were exposed to themes of civil rights, unfairness, bigotry and fathers struggling against the kind of mob of the town, so you remember how you felt as a kid being taken seriously, that you are part of the human drama.
With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama.
Sometimes, if I really just need to unwind and kind of watch something that isn't gonna stress me out or have drama in it, I watch 'Spongebob.'
'Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie.'
In a drama, you generally have to be very faithful to the script and the storyline, and it all has to fit together, and it's weighty and serious.
Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.
