Now there is so much expertise and brainpower it's hard to be at the cutting edge of what's cool and not do something that's totally geeky.
If you ask any person on this crew what they think of Hugh Jackman they'll admit they've never seen anything like it. I'll give him an emotional note and he'll hit it every time.
I'm not a comic book guy at all.
I only want to work with actors that really get it and make it work. I didn't want it to be a star-driven thing anymore.
I hope that Requiem is better than Pi. I hope that Pi is better than my student films, and I'm hoping that I'm getting better as I get older.
Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.
I'd like to do a lot of different stuff. I think it's important as a creative person to keep challenging yourself and keep doing new stuff. If you end up trying to repeat yourself it's death. It just becomes boring and takes the passion out of it. You gotta find stories and characters that you really want to hang out with.
I think video games and that stuff should be as violent as possible, but age-appropriate. It should be realistic. When it's not realistic you run into kids running around shooting people and not realizing the consequences.
These wrestlers aren't organized. They have no union, no pension and no insurance. You meet wrestler after wrestler who sold out Madison Square Garden ten years ago, basically running on fumes today. There's a lot of drama there.
Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in.
Classical scores go up and down; they're kind of hysterical in a way. And movie scores are much more - they just drive and move forward, and they build and can't go up and down at that same speed. It's a big job to turn that into something that pushes the movie along.
'Angel Heart' was one of my favorite films.
It would be nice to make a movie that other people want to make, because every one of these movies, I basically have to find the only company in the world that's willing to make it, and it's always a big challenge. I end up spending a tremendous amount of energy and time trying to get money to make these movies and it's exhausting.
I don't make films that are easy to market, unfortunately. I think that 'Pi' was the easiest one, because we had that symbol to stick up everywhere, so that was a good gimmick, and created a good mystery, and we didn't have to do huge scale.
I wasn't a big fan of social anthropology. And, luckily, that created room for me to work in visual arts because I sort of ignored my requirements. I think I was attracted to social anthropology because I liked to travel and was always interested in far-off places.
I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life.
I know some people that have gone through serious struggles. People that were close to me, and I've seen some terrible things about people who lose it. So I think that type of pain is something that's human and that, actually, can help us look at ourselves a little bit.
