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.
— Jodie Foster
Casting is a long process for me. I take a lot of time.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
'Taxi Driver' was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I didn't become a weirdo and squawk like a chicken.
Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock do romantic comedies. I do dark dramas. I do these movies well.
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.
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 make dark dramas, movies about people living in desperate fear who then overcome that fear and find a heroic side to themselves.
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 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.
It's hard to get personal films off the ground, and it's hard developing them.
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.
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.
The world is littered with movies about people that are depressed that either did not come out or are not successful.
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 will always love psychology, and the basis of psychology is family.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'Silence Of The Lambs' was not something people expected me to do.
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.
I do almost all my movies in French. I dub them.
I like to nap. I do like to sleep. Sometimes I sleep in between takes.
I don't find acting and directing schizophrenic in any way. I find it completely easy to move between the two.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 just want to make movies. I really love movies. I want to be involved with them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I'd always need a creative outlet. But sometimes, I do fantasize what my life would be like if I weren't famous.
