The world is littered with movies about people that are depressed that either did not come out or are not successful.
Casting is a long process for me. I take a lot of time.
I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.
I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.
All the movies that I make in some ways have to be the story of my life. There are different chapters in my life.
I will always love psychology, and the basis of psychology is family.
I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.
I never know what's going to move me. I'm always surprised. And it's always a mystery to the people who work with me.
There are conscious reasons and unconscious reasons why I pick something. You know, I have to be moved by the story and usually that means it has to touch me in some kind of personal place.
I like to be in a different place when I make a movie so that I can't really focus on anything else, and that is your world.
I think every movie changes me and is life changing, especially movies you direct.
Adolescence is a tough one to be a child actor.
Most actors don't really have a director's sensibility. They have an actor's sensibility.
I don't like the outside world to intrude when I'm making a film. I like to either see my family or work, but I don't like to go out.
I just want to make movies. I really love movies. I want to be involved with them.
'Taxi Driver' was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I didn't become a weirdo and squawk like a chicken.
I was never the ingenue or the pretty girlfriend of Tom Cruise in a movie. I didn't have that career, so I don't have to compete on that level.
I'm really not a clothes person. To me, that's just work. It's the thing I hate to do the most. I don't want to be judged in that way.
Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock do romantic comedies. I do dark dramas. I do these movies well.
'Silence Of The Lambs' was not something people expected me to do.
As an actor, I'm always playing solitary characters. But as a director, I'm always making ensemble movies, which focus on lots of people's lives and how they intertwine.
My earliest memories are doing commercials and TV.
I had a certain career as an actor that I think was quite personal as well, and had a lot of integrity, but I wasn't writing my own things or directing my own movies.
I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.
With 'Taxi Driver,' I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn't me.
I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it. It allows you to really appreciate the hand of the filmmaker.
I do almost all my movies in French. I dub them.
As I've said before, and I still hold to, I truly am the most boring person alive. And if there was a great investigation to be found at the end of the resume, it would be, the most boring person alive.
I don't make movies because I love to act. I make movies because I like to make movies, and I like to be a part of that process.
I like dramas. I've always liked dramas. And I'm a pretty light person. I don't consider myself a very dramatic person. But I do like doing that onscreen.
