Music is the only passion I shamelessly indulge in. However, for recreation I enjoy watching movies. 'Wizard of Oz' was the first film I ever saw, followed by the 'Bond' movies. I also watch a lot of World cinema through DVDs mostly brought by one of my best friends who's now based in Toronto.
A. R. Rahman
A good film demands its own score, and if you are a musician, your conscience will never allow you to do something mediocre for a good film.
I compose music for films, and by the grace of God, I've got a few awards. That's it.
I want young Indian composers to be able to do more than just film music. I want to give them the skills that will enable them to create their own palette of sounds instead of having to write formulaic music. It doesn't matter if they become sound engineers, producers, composers or performers - I want them to be as imaginative as they like.
I usually work on a film soundtrack for two years, turning in a song every few months, and that keeps my creative energy high, because I'm constantly rotating projects. The trick is to make sure I don't work too hard and get exhausted.
I'm a Sufi Muslim, I would say. I believe in using the medium to create a good vibration because art is so important to society. Some projects I don't do because I feel that it's going to create a bad vibe. I don't do propaganda films that are anti another religion, anti-Muslim or anti-Hindu.
Compared with other Indian film composers, I only write about six movies a year. Others write up to 60.
The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
I like to see a film and then start scoring it in my mind while doing something unrelated. You just grasp a film and start working, and something unpredictable comes out from a third element. The mind, the more active it is, the more productive it is.
Beautiful film music can be made relevant to any period.
In film, you are a totally different person than in the video.
Aaliyah
I have had unsuccessful films, but I learned a lot from those films. I give my failures as much importance as my success.
Aamir Khan
When I was new, I didn't know where my career will go. Initially, my films were not even successful, but then I learned a lot from my mistakes.
I feel that, in India, we have films that have tackled various issues over the years, but perhaps one of the issues that we've tackled less is the issue of caste-ism. That's an issue we've more or less stayed away from... although we touched on it briefly in some films like 'Lagaan.'
My films are so new and unique that I don't know where I will end up. Fear keeps me alert. And it's also a part of an excitement.
When I am shooting a film, then everything goes soft focus. My family also complains that I don't give them time.
For me, the driving emotion of selecting a film is that I just love that story. It may give a message, it may not give a message - that's fine. I just loved it.
Essentially, it is the director who is the creative head of a film. The final authority on all decisions lies with the director. That is how it should be. And then other team members can give their creative inputs.
I'm a football player, you know? My film talks for me.
Aaron Donald
All I can do is play football, put it on film.
I don't care if it was 2 o'clock in the morning after a night game. I had to break down the film by myself before I watched it with the team. I wanted to see everything I did wrong and did right or I wouldn't be able to sleep.
I feel I can rush the passer well. I feel like I can play the run even better than what I did starting off to when I got in my senior year as far as making plays in the backfield and just being able to break down film a lot better.
It's always good to show that what you're doing is who you are, what you see on film in the regular season is what you're seeing at the Senior Bowl.
You never really know as an actor; it's completely out of your control, in terms of editing, and music, and film stock, shot selection, and what takes they use.
Yeah, I'd like to get the girl and at least make it through the film.
A film has its own life and takes its own time.
If it helps me in the way that if this movie is successful, I get to make more films, great, and the more films that I make and the more interest that I'm allowed to cover, the better for me and the better, hopefully, for the people who like to watch me.
I can think of films that I'm producing right now that are extremely hard-hitting, graphic films, that nobody necessarily wants to see, graphic in terms of violence, of adult content and racial and historical subject matter.
They say an elephant never forgets. Well, you are not an elephant. Take notes, constantly. Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologies... the medium doesn't matter, so long as it inspires you.
I've always been excited by rotoscoping, the technique used in films like 'Waking Life,' which fuses animation with real-life emotion. It seemed like it was a process ripe for innovation.
I interned at Miramax and subsequently at Paramount because I was really curious about the future of entertainment - how were we going to get films online? While the inspiration for Box didn't come from that experience directly, it was very obvious that bigger businesses had a lot of slow processes and cumbersome technology.
On a big film, there's almost no way you can meet everyone. On an indie, there are 30 people and no trailers to duck into.
What's so great about Sundance is that they only accept such a small handful of films per year for dramatic competition, so you know when you're going to Sundance that you're going to see top-quality projects.
I always gravitate towards the independent side of things, just because those are the stories I always fall in love with, but you don't really get paid, and living in Los Angeles is expensive, and I have a mortgage to pay. So it's good to jump onto a studio film and then in all my other time do small passion projects.
My heart is in independent film-making. For me, it's where the fun, gritty storytelling is being told.
With this film, 'Need For Speed,' with this, we had a blank canvas to work with. What we had to do was have fast cars, and that's it.
I gravitate toward edgy, intense, dark films that just grab you by the throat.
That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.
From the very beginning, I've always just wanted to do something I've never done before. I'm still just trying to be on that path. It's all about working with filmmakers that you believe in.
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
The show is '12 Monkeys,' and I'm playing the role that Bruce Willis played in the original film '12 Monkeys.' It is a show about time travel. My character is from a future post-apocalypse, and he has been given a mission to go back in time to essentially set things right and stop the apocalypse. No big deal.
People have always liked to be frightened. People love to feel that jolt of adrenaline. People love roller coasters. People love skydiving. These things that really get your heart pumping, and horror films are sort of a safe way to get that rush I guess.
I do know that I've read somewhere that it's been statistically proven that in times of war, horror films are much more popular. I don't know why that is. You'd think it'd be the opposite. You'd think people would want to escape from it.
You have to find it in the moment, and that's one of the challenges of being an actor - especially a film actor - is that you have to maintain these heightened emotions for long periods of time. There's no trick to it. You just have to do.
Wes Craven is obviously a horror film icon so I was definitely very interested in bringing something back to life that Wes had created.
As a fan, when I hear that a film is going to be turned into a television show, I do go to that place immediately of, 'Is it going to be any good? Is it going to be a waste of time? Why are they doing it?' It's '12 Monkeys,' and '12 Monkeys' is awesome, so I wanted to be a part of it and work on it.
When you're done with a job, even if you do stay in contact with certain people, it's never quite the same. It's a unique experience when you're working on a film or a television show together. You're together for 16 hours every day, sometimes six days a week. You're just never going to have that proximity again. So you miss people.
I never wore a single fedora filming 'L.A. Noire.' It took about an hour and a half to do the hair - it was a very precise process.
To be honest, I owned one suit before I filmed 'Mad Men' - the one suit that you have to have as an adult. Outside of that, I never really felt comfortable in a suit.
I get more fulfilment from being a father than I do from being an actor.
