I hope I haven't grown up. The cliche for all artists is that you don't want to lose that child inside. I think when you get sedentary and set in your ways, you can lose a lot of that spontaneity and creativity. I hope I'm holding on to that.
Catherine Hardwicke
Some directors I worked with didn't even know how to read a blueprint, understand a plan.
I respect all the teenagers I work with and feel that everything they have to say is just as valuable as anything I have to say.
There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.
I had always liked, well, who didn't love Lestat and fall in love with 'Interview with the Vampire,' and 'Nosferatu,' and Coppola's 'Dracula' with the awesome costumes? So I loved all that.
I'm immature.
People love to talk, so let them have fun talking.
You don't pay the same price for a Ferrari as you do for a Honda Accord. But for some reason, for movie tickets, you're asked to pay the same price for 'Avatar' as you are for some $2 million movie, which is kind of a weird thing when you think about it.
Every filmmaker's just going to keep trying to make it the best you can make it: make it as potent and interesting and entertaining and exciting and tough and sexy as you can.
There's so many versions of 'Red Riding Hood.' It goes back 700 years.
Back in medieval times, Victorian repression hadn't come in yet. People were bawdy and wild and more in touch with their true natures. If you look at the Bosch paintings or Bruegel, you see, when people are dancing, they're totally cutting loose.
Nowadays, to get a movie greenlit, you have to make an incredible effort.
When I read the 'Twilight' book, I didn't see it as fantasy. I saw it as a love story.
My first movie, 'Thirteen,' and it was very real - almost too real. It was very gritty, with raw human emotion. I'd love to do something like that again.
I was always trying to do architectural jam sessions. But it's not quite as easy as singing or playing a guitar, so I would always see wonderful live musicians and just envy them that I wasn't in that medium.
I still like the idea of having an intimate experience with a movie, but I love watching stuff on my iPad. It's close, and I feel like I'm a part of it, so maybe that makes more sense in some cases.
As a filmmaker and film student, I think it's really interesting to hear what a director did and how they figured out how to do things.
When I talk to film students, I always say, 'Buy the DVDs and listen to the commentaries, look at the making of, look at the behind-the-scenes,' because that's such a great learning tool.
Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.
As a director, you've got to have quite a few projects going because you never know which one will actually come together with the financing and get the green light.
Starting with 'Thirteen,' my known technique is to cast the lead, then find someone with whom they have incredible chemistry.
I try to learn on each project, try to really feel what the characters are feeling.
I don't like to watch a movie where it's just kind of like all one note, dee-dee-dee-dee. I want spikes of adrenaline and highs and lows and exciting tension release.
Obviously, 'Twilight' had its own alchemy that was amazing, just phenomenal. Nobody thought it was going to make any money. Paramount wouldn't make the movie. Fox wouldn't make it. Nobody wanted to do it.
I think at any age, you can stay open and creative and excited.
For a film, when you condense, you don't want to keep going back to the same setting over and over.
We can learn from everybody.
I'll literally pay three Hollywood readers who don't know me to read my scripts under the radar and give cold comments. And at the early screenings of my movies, I'll hand out questionnaires that can be filled out anonymously so people can be brutally honest because, to your face, they won't be.
There are some moments where you're so depressed, you cannot see the way, and you're like, 'Whatever. Bite me.' I think all directors feel that way sometimes.
You don't watch 'A Beautiful Mind' and say, 'This is how every mathematician is.'
So many images are saying to girls, 'Show a lot of skin and look gorgeous and sexy.'
Kids have to experiment a little or figure out where they belong.
I've worked on really big budget movies as a designer - 'Vanilla Sky,' 'Three Kings;' I've been in that world, and you can just see people get nervous.
I've had meetings where there were literally, like, 12 angry men in a room and me. And even when everyone shot me down, I somehow dug in one more time.
Being in construction my whole life - I was trained as an architect - I always had to work with guys. And I always did my homework and then challenged them to figure it out faster than me. They don't want to be shown up by a woman.
The boys in junior high get really lewd and say outrageous stuff to the girls. If somebody yelled the stuff at me that I've heard at junior high schools I've visited, I'd be scared and humiliated.
The script for 'Thirteen' is tight, and not because of the now-famous six day writing spree, but more because it started out as 15 pages longer.
If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.
Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.
You're fearless when you're a kid.
Of course I went and got 'Breaking Dawn' at midnight the night it came out and read it instantly. I was like, 'Yes!'
Actually, yeah, I am an artist. I draw.
A great screenplay makes everybody step up to the bar and deliver.
How do you fight when you're trying to pull somebody's arms off or twist their head off? That makes for a different kind of fight.
After 'Inconvenient Truth,' we hit a tipping point where almost everybody in America cares about the environment.
What does 'dating' mean? I don't know. I couldn't say.
You have a big success, and it's still not easy to make a movie.
I had a bunch of other projects that I worked really hard on after 'Twilight,' and the magic just didn't hit.
I could go my whole life and say, 'I'm not going to do anything with a love triangle,' but whenever you have a romance, there has to be some obstacle, and even the dumbest romantic comedies have a love triangle or something.
As a director, we work ridiculously hard on every detail, and we do everything to the billionth degree, and mostly people notice nothing.
