The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?
— Ridley Scott
By going to a preview, a director becomes insidiously infected by the process, so by the end of it, you're thinking, 'It may be a bit too long.'
Sometimes, scenes are great without any music at all.
Sometimes you can do a TV show on a subject you just can't do in film. Either it's too long or studios will perceive it as not being commercial.
Sometimes I find I'm wearing a divided, split brain in terms of drama and humor.
If 'formulaic' is somebody who is unlikely to succeed starting down a process and succeeding - then isn't that what most films are about? And art films are about people who aren't likely to succeed and then don't succeed.
I like a film such as 'American Beauty,' and I like 'Spider-Man.'
As soon as you're at the higher levels of budgeting, you've got to get the film made, and the only way to support the film is to have actors who can support the budget.
There are some moments that are pretty distressing in 'Prometheus.' In fact, the last hour is pretty distressing.
Anybody who does 90 takes has a problem.
I want to return to the epic idea of the grand, big Western, in the sense that 'The Searchers' was.
If somebody's given me X amount of dollars to fulfill a dream, they've got every right to actually say something about it.
I'm agnostic because I went through the usual process of parents insisting you go to church, and yet they didn't. So there's me, sitting in the chairs, thinking, 'Jeez, why am I here? I'd rather be playing tennis, seriously.'
Once, I got slaughtered after 'Blade Runner' by Pauline Kael: three pages of slaughter. I was so offended, I would never read any more press.
Any period is fascinating: the more ancient, the better.
Try writing a book, dude. That's difficult.
You could have ten scientists in this room. You could ask them all: 'Who's religious?' About three to four will put their hands up.
You just don't know when you get all the paint across the canvas how it will turn out. When you step back after you've finished, you say, 'This one is not so good. This one is good.'
The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.
I'm a reader. I found out that, whether you're a studio head or a director, you must read your own material. You can't rely on readers.
I come out of TV. I come out of live television, BBC drama: that's where I started first as a designer, then a director. Then I went independent TV, then television advertising.
The word 'comedy' implies slapstick.
I used to agonise over what to do next, but now I'm making a movie a year. It's insane, but it's only a movie after all. You just hang in there, and occasionally you might make something which you can call art... briefly.
Fundamentally, I always find that most of the films that I've put out are essentially the director's cut. Part of the process with a director's cut is the leaving behind of certain aspects of the movie that we don't feel necessary because they aren't part of the dynamic of the story.
I would like to have a bit of a break and do a comedy.
I wanted 'Alien' to be all about claustrophobia.
The 3D world allows you to engage even more with a film because you're somehow drawn into the landscape or the universe of that scene. Even when it's two people talking at a table, you feel like you're a third party.
If you circle above Central Park at night in a helicopter, you're looking down at the most expensive real estate in the world. It's the American Monopoly board.
I think over time I've learned to stop being a screamer and get interactive; otherwise, you get killed in Hollywood. I stopped being a screamer shortly after 'Blade Runner,' kicking doors and things like that, because I wasn't actually getting anywhere.
Unfortunately, we don't seem to learn from history, do we? And you'd think we would.
I don't make films for other people; I make films for me.
Everyone is tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshiping the same god.
The Gulf of Mexico, they believe, is a huge asteroid. That was an impact zone, you know that? Yeah, for that big a thing to actually hit our globe, it would have had to adjusted the spin, the axis.
Scaring someone's the hardest thing to do, and that's why most of these scary movies are not scary. They're sick, but not scary. There's a lot of sickness out there, of people who then sit there and watch it, which I think is absolutely dismaying.
I've got a terrible knee from too much tennis.
Business fascinates me. It's very creative.
They say, 'TV is not a captive audience,' but it definitely is. You can easily switch off the bloody television.
The great attraction to 'American Gangster' is these two great characters who are absolute paradoxes within their own sphere.
I didn't want to go down the route of spending a year of my life making a movie that would never be seen. I may as well go down a route making a film that a lot of people will see, which is the whole idea behind cinema.
Because I was a kid from north of England, the only films I had access to was not alternative cinema, which in those days would be foreign cinema; I would be looking at all the Hollywood movies that arrived at my High Street.
It's very difficult to find good scripts in Hollywood any more.
There has to be absolute trust between the tiger and its master, but its master must be the master - there must be no mistake about that.
I have a healthy competitive nature.
We can't terraform yet, but we know it exists.
History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.
The word 'religion' is only a label. What lies behind that, the most important thing of all, is the word 'faith'. You either have faith, or you don't have faith, or you have degrees of faith - and if you have degrees of faith, then you become agnostic. You're kind of in-between, or you're on the fence.
The key thing is you can be the only person, your own critic.
The digital and theatrical markets are two different marketplaces.
The time it would take me to write a screenplay it would take me the time to make two films. I would rather make the movies, and I'm a better moviemaker than I would be writer.
I'm fundamentally a positive person. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing some of the insane movies that I do.
