 I certainly didn't think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football. |
| It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with. |
| I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my father's respect or interest, or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology, but I was always trying to build things. |
| If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad. |
| Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee. |
| I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots. |
| The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern. |
| The film industry is about saying 'no' to people, and inherently you cannot take 'no' for an answer. |
| I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living. |
| There is a hugely underserved population out there... those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest. |
| My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer. |
| I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean. |
| The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors. |
| I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth. |
| I blame it on Walt Disney, where animals are given human qualities. People don't understand that a wild animal is not something that is nice to pat. It can seriously harm you. |
| What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death? |
| You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything. |
| I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism. |
| You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they'll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself. |
| So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world. |
