I grew up idolising Madhuri Dixit, though I wasn't a Hindi film buff. I had an academic upbringing, and movies were a rarity. I looked up to Madhuri because I loved dancing, and she's a fantastic dancer.
I grew up with 'The Little Rascals' and always try to work a link into every one of my movies.
I simply don't want to enter the rat race. I like doing movies because I like acting and not because I want to reach the top.
My mum and my dad have really good taste in movies. My gran would tape them off the TV and write notes about them, rating them.
Most of my movies get about a third raves, a third vicious attacks, and a third in-between.
If audiences are sort of interested in movies that are made like McDonald's hamburgers, which do have a value in the world, then we have to re-evaluate our entire career.
There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.
I think there's still an appetite among a certain audience to see intelligent movies that have real emotion in them.
Lots of people have criticized my movies, but nobody has ever identified the real problem: I'm a sloppy filmmaker.
El Santo's movies were kind of out there, but Mil Mascaras did the more reality-based type sci-fi movies. You could say he was one of the first to open the notion for those that subscribe to the mentality that this is sports-entertainment.
I shoot reality-based movies, and in actual locations, shooting them with a star is next to impossible.
For horror movies, color is reassuring because, at least in older films, it adds to the fakey-ness.
I never see my movies. When they're on television, I click them away. Hollywood created an image, and I long ago reconciled myself with it. I was the French cliche.
I grew up in the working class suburbs in the 80s so I do love Hollywood movies but what I don't like is when they take something that's successful and they recycle it.
I don't actually read that much. I like movies a bit more. That's how I come up with ideas - by seeing things, hearing things, recycling things. Stealing things!
Terry Malick offered me three parts in 'The Thin Red Line.' I was busy shooting other movies while he asked me the first two.
The go-to reflex all over Hollywood is still likeability. I've always had a problem with it because I think I have a weird barometer in the sense that some of the characters I've cared about the most in movies are characters that are often thought of as despicable.
Listen, there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change, but I've never worked on a movie, including my own, that didn't take advantage of a rehearsal process.
Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.
'Deewar' has been remade so many times, 'Trishul' has been remade so many times. But 'Don' - no one has gone into this area as often as they have gone into these other movies, and I think it fits into the modern sensibility of movie viewing quite well.
