'Perfect Sense' is a film about love and catastrophe, which I hope is a powerfully romantic and emotional take on the apocalyptic sub-genre. Its aim is to be a minimalist concept movie - where seismic events occur in simple ways that ask the audience to use their imagination.
Edinburgh is a sort of gothic fairytale city, and it can be a gothic horror city as well.
Most of the films I've tried to make I've ended up making. And they don't necessarily go in the order you want to do. So I haven't got a huge list of undone films or stuff that's just been abandoned forever.
I'm an international director.
I have a memory of this experience when I was young, watching 'Stop Making Sense,' the Talking Heads concert movie, which is one of the best concert movies ever, and I saw it in a full house in New Zealand, and everyone was cheering between songs, and you really felt like you were part of the audience at the gig.
Event cinema is what it is, and I understand why it's successful. It started with things like 'Jaws,' which are extraordinary movies. But what we've lost are great character films which are beautifully directed and had great movie stars in them. Films that were about something rather than about spectacle.
When I started making films, all the theaters, the screen would slide open the widest possible point, and that would be widescreen. But now, theaters are geared up for around 16:9, so scope is now 'letterboxed.' In a way, if you want the big picture, you shoot 16:9.
I sort of feel like my job is to be a conduit to opportunities, to maximize the creativity of the day itself - because that's when the cameras are running. That's the important thing to me. Some of these shots you need to think about in advance; you need to have some ideas for them.
I like the idea of the audience absorbing the language and getting to understand it as they journey through the film. It starts off being more obscure, but you get used to it. A 'Clockwork Orange' thing. I read 'Clockwork Orange' without any vocabulary, and I got to understand the words as I went through it. I like that process. It immerses you.
Signature film-making seems rather dull to me; it's about finding something you can do something with and running with the ball.
As a director, when you embrace a project, you try to understand as much as you can about its world, and you do that by embracing and engaging with people who are in that world. Then it's down to your best instincts, which is what most directing is about anyway.
Being open to what's happening in front of you is the most important thing about being a director. To allow the magic to exist and to be light enough on your feet to harness it as it's happening. That's what makes cinema interesting.