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.
It's hard to get personal films off the ground, and it's hard developing them.
I don't direct so that I can have an identity and so I can go on to CGI movies. I had a big identity as an actor, and that's not what I'm looking for from directing. Directing is a whole different goal.
Every movie changes you. The process of making a film changes you.
Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.
I read more than I do anything else, probably. I read about three books a week.
People are always surprised when I say that I'm an atheist.
My mom was always late. It drove me crazy as a child. So I'm always on time - or early.
Acting, for me, is exhausting. I'm always more energized by directing. It's more intense to direct. I can pop in and express myself, then pop out again. It's a huge passion for me.
I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in.
I don't know why people think child actresses in particular are screwed up. I see kids everywhere who are totally bored. I've never been bored a day in my life.
I prefer to commit 100 per cent to a movie and make fewer films, because it takes over your life.
I'd like to be Dakota Fanning when I get young.
Well, I certainly was exposed to and learned to appreciate the work of great directors early on. As a kid, my mother used to take me to see really interesting arty films in Los Angeles.
So, yes, there's nothing I love more than listening to directors talk about their movies.
Part of me longs to do a job where there's not a gray area.
My kids are young and my life with them is really stimulating and really full and significant.
I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.
I'm kind of a chatterbox and I talk really fast.
I wish that I spoke more languages. I speak a couple languages, but not well enough to really dub myself. French is really the only one, and it's a difficult thing.
I wish people could get over the hang-up of subtitles, although at the same time, you know, that's kind of why I'm kind of pro dubbing.
I think Anna and the King is a look at Asia from the Asian perspective, reflecting the Asian experience, which is very rare.
I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.
I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it.
I love European movies and I kind of grew up on European films.
I had to take my makeup off at work every night. I wasn't allowed to do it at home because my mom said that when your work day is done, you're done with work.
I fantasize about having a manual job where I can come home at night, read a book and not feel responsible for what will happen the next day.
I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.
I am the luckiest filmmaker I know.
I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.
By the first week of shooting, you know exactly where your film is heading based on the psychology of your director.
But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy.
I don't find acting and directing schizophrenic in any way. I find it completely easy to move between the two.
Everybody reads for me. I was never weird about that. I never minded coming in and reading. They should know if I'm the right person, and I should know if I want to do a movie.
I don't see anyone walking around with a puppet on his hand in real life. Puppet therapy is very common for children. It's not something that adults take on.
I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.
Acting just happens to be my skill, but I think I would probably be just as happy being a technician or entering into the film business in some other way.
Every movie that I've had to really knock down the door for has been an enormous success for me. Not just like a financial success but a real personal success.
I'd always need a creative outlet. But sometimes, I do fantasize what my life would be like if I weren't famous.
I love the way L A. leaves you alone. I can go home, read all day, and nobody bugs me.
I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.
The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.
I want to be inspiring to myself, to my kids, my family, and my friends.
I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.
But now I really don't want to work unless I really, really care about a project.
Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.
The movies I made when I was 14 or 15, I have a hard time looking at those. Those were the awkward years. I don't know if anybody can look at something they did when they were 14 and not wince.
Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.
I don't have a burning desire to act, strangely enough. I don't know that if I hadn't been an actor as a young person, I don't know that I ever would have chosen this because it's not really my personality.
As an actor, I'm attracted to drama; as a director, it's humor - because it's the story of my life, and I can't be that serious about it. Being alone is a big theme in all my movies, both as a director and as an actress.
Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.
I have, in some ways, saved characters that have been marginalized by society by playing them - and having them still have dignity and still survive, still get through it.
I make dark dramas, movies about people living in desperate fear who then overcome that fear and find a heroic side to themselves.
I like to nap. I do like to sleep. Sometimes I sleep in between takes.
It's very hard for me to get a new car. It's really hard for me to get a new house. It's really hard for me to move on from the things that give me stability.
I think 'destiny' is just a fancy word for a psychological pattern.
Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.
It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me.
My definition of a friend is somebody who adores you even though they know the things you're most ashamed of.
I think anybody over 30 plays parents because it happens in your thirties and so that's kind of a natural progression. But I'm definitely drawn to it. It's probably the most intense, passionate thing that happens to you as you get older.
Any actor working a long time should know how a shot is set up, where to place themselves, how to handle the lines. I'm a member of the crew, like the best boy, the electrician. What I'm good at is making eyes at the camera.
You develop a third eye where you kind of know where they are in a room at all times but no matter how vigilant you are as a parent, at some point, you'll look around a room and can't find them and there's a searing pain that goes through your body.
I don't like it when reviews aren't about the movie. When they're about how much money somebody made, or who they're sleeping with, or if they got the job via some connection, or about how Fox is putting X amount of dollars into it.
I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity. The answer is always art.
Boys are easy. I mean, there are just a lot of bruises when they're young. With boys, you get a lot of accidental jabs in the eye and stepping on your feet, and those tantrums they cause when they don't want to leave the toy store.
If I make two movies my entire life, and they're two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don't need to be Steven Spielberg.
I was one of those avid moviegoers as a kid, and we didn't have video, so we went to see everything five times. I went to see every foreign film playing in my town. As times went on, I watched a lot less films. I have a different film school now. My film school now is my life experience.
In a weird way, that's the beauty of being an actor. You get to live out things that you're afraid of, and you get to say, 'Well, maybe I can get to the end of it and survive it intact and I can be the hero of my own story.' It's kind of a way of exorcising fear.
