I tend to find that movies have become so slick that I have trouble identifying with the characters.
I had seen 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' and I thought that was a different kind of film than I'd seen before, with that kind of editing and slick camera movements.
The toughest trail I ever ran was the Escarpment in the Catskills of New York State. This was an 18-mile race through Rip Van Winkle country, routed through boulder fields, across angular juttings of granite and along a path with an unrelenting barrage of roots, rocks and mud, all of it hidden under slick leaves and dangling nettles.
I wasn't going to make a slick, glossy over-produced piece of entertainment because then I would be doing what the Capitol did. Then I'm actually putting on the Hunger Games and not making a movie of the 'Hunger Games.'
At the time we did 'Night,' I was a director of television commercials. Some of them cost a lot more than our whole movie. They were very slick, sophisticated... we wanted the opposite look for 'Night.' We wanted it to look like a newsreel.
With 'Dawn,' I wanted the slick look; I wanted to bring out the nature of the shopping center, the retail displays, the mannequins. There are times when maybe you reflect that the mannequins are more attractive but less real - less sympathetic, even - than the zombies. Put those kinds of images side by side, and you raise all sorts of questions.
When Slick Rick first hit the scene, I had to practice that British accent. There's no other storyteller like this man.
In an interview with a journalist, you look petty taking the pot shot but in a slick ad you can really do damage - including unfair damage - from afar. It is not that much different than waging a war by a drone than by hand-to-hand combat.
'Evita' was four pieces of slick paper and a record album. It's the most scary, to sit down and dictate a musical scene by scene. It was a musical unlike anything I'd ever seen before myself.
Everyone tries to be so slick and modern and computerized. I've always done everything myself with little money, so I guess it's become 'my look,' but it's not really intentional.
