Also expressionistic filmmaking – making the audience feel like they were inside the characters’ heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.
I spent about a year and a half doing technical post work on ‘The Fountain’. Although I do like the process, I think my favorite part of filmmaking is the actors.
I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.
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.
When people think about the ark, they’re always thinking about all the thousands of years of religious iconography of a ship with a bow and a deck, where Noah and the giraffes could walk around. In the actual written text it is basically described as a long, rectangular box.
That’s the time to play around, the moment of theater. And then you can shape things. But a lot of it is just managing stuff. It’s upsetting because you get away from the core.
I’ve always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There’s hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn’t hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.
I think that there’s an infinite amount of places where you can stick a camera. There’s an infinite amount of choices of what could be going on. There’s an infinite amount of places for so many things, so you have to figure out how to do your job.
I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you’re following your passion.
I’ve been joking that if Madonna taught us anything, you’ve got to reinvent yourself. I think it’s important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you’ve got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances.
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.
