“It’s very difficult for me to go to theatres these days. Also, when I did go a few years ago, the nature of the audience, the noise – it’s not taken seriously. And it hurts. I mean comedies too. There’s an attitude, there are phones going off, people talking. It’s crazy.”
— Martin Scorsese has the same problems you do a the cinema. (via Time Out)
“Before we made this film, we actually bought an air doll, filled it up, and put it in a conference room. We tested putting its air out. When she’s full, she was just plastic. But when the air went out of her, there’s something about the way her knees bent that felt very erotic to all the males in the room. For me, it’s a portrait of the difference in how men and women approach sex: she wants to be fulfilled; he wants to unfill her.”
— Hirokazu Kore-eda on pre-production for Air Doll (via Time Out Hong Kong)
“Another difficulty stems from the director’s high standard. He demands the same from a cow as he does a good actor. So we sometimes had to do more than 100 takes for a single shot. I was so close to breakdown that I wanted to beat somebody up. But what could you do in front of a cow?”
— HK comedian Huang Bo on the trouble with bovines and his new film Dou niu/Cow (via Time Out Hong Kong)
“Among the jaded, the very phrase ‘Petronas commercial’ became shorthand for emotional manipulation. But if one of these commercials were to come on TV at one of Malaysia’s crowded open-air eateries, most people would stop to watch. Anything that can tear Malaysians away from their food, at least temporarily, must be special. Then you realize the truth of one of her favorite sayings: A nation is nothing without the stories it tells (about) itself.”
— Critic Amir Muhammad on the commercials made by the late Malaysian filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad (via Moving Image Source)
“The only thing I was particular about was that this character should not come across as a caricature or just as an object of mockery.”
— Actor Kapil Sharma talks playing a gay model in the controversial Dunno Y . . . Na Jaane Kyun, which is said feature Bollywood’s first guy-on-guy kiss. (via The Times)
“The jail thing is very, very present in all of my work… Sometimes not very frontally. La Captive, it’s the same, Jeanne Dielman, it’s the same. She is also in her own jail, and she needs her jail to survive. That’s why when she got an orgasm, it destroyed her jail and her existence, and so she killed the guy. And the jail is coming from the camps, because my mother was in the camps, and she internalized that and gave it to me. Thank you.”
— Director Chantal Akerman talks rooms and prisons (via The A.V. Club)
“What we don’t grasp too well is that there may be people who have extremely conservative views about the world, the separation of women, and the West, but who also abhor acts of violence. We see a connection or a progression from Salafism to Wahhabism to, you know, Osama bin Laden, and while that exists, it’s simply not true that they’re all the same.”
— Chris Morris discusses his new movie Four Lions at Sundance (via Salon)
“Rohmer’s energy and drive are superhuman. Since he has neither assistants nor a scriptwriter, he keeps track of everything himself, down to the least important problems. He even does errands: he sweeps the floor of the set after a day’s work and makes five o’clock tea for the crew.”
— Cinematographer Nestor Almendros on working with Eric Rohmer (via Moving Image Source)
SquallyShowers 