Quotes

Roman Polanski, a master filmmaker, said there is only one perfect place for the camera at any given time. When you shoot animation, and you have exactly the same performance, exactly the same words, exactly the same lighting, but you shift the camera, you're virtually able to prove that. You can experiment with the camera in animation with no cost. And you would find, as best as you could, that ideal place... That's why I think some of the best filmmaking comes out of places like Pixar and DreamWorks and all the animation houses, because they know where they can put the camera. [2015]

Bernard Herrmann said that cinema is a mosaic art. It's all the little pieces that go together that make up the whole. So you find those little pieces. [2015]

There's only one perfect place for the camera at any given time. And I learned that on the animations. You can move the camera wherever you like. But to tell the story - it was interesting how much you could influence the story by simply shooting from another perspective. [2014]

I just love action movies. For me, the most universal language and the purest syntax of cinema is in the action movies. [2015]

[about the world of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)] All of the catastrophic events we read about in the news - economic collapse, power grids breaking down, wholesale climate change, some nuclear skirmish on the other side of the globe - as of next Wednesday, all of those things will have happened. Then we jump 45 years into the future. There, we have a world that has regressed back to almost medieval behavior. Only the artifacts of the present world survive. For instance, the kind of vehicles we have now, which rely so much on computers, really wouldn't survive in a postapocalyptic world. But the hot rods and muscle cars not only survive, they become almost fetishized, like religious artifacts. [2015]

[on the character Max Rockatansky] He's all of us, amplified. Each of us in our own way is looking for meaning in a chaotic world. He's got that one instinct-to survive. After the first Mad Max (1979), we went to Japan and they said, "We know this character, he's a ronin, like a samurai." In Scandinavia they called him a lone, wandering Viking. To others he's a classic American Western figure. [2015]

[on Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)] In the 30-odd years since not only has the world changed, cinema has changed. The way we experience films has changed. And I've changed too. [2015]

The way I think of filmmaking - it's such a seductive thing. It encompasses every human discipline you can imagine - composition, art, technology, music, movement and choreography. It encompasses all life. We are the servants of the zeitgeist and we live in a chaotic world. There is so much information coming at you, we are trying to find resonances out there to create some kind of meaning. Stories are a way of distilling something out of all that bombardment. They are a way of finding signal in the noise. That's very seductive. Very.

I see filmmaking as a strange journey. In mythology, the trickster leads you into the forest. Film is, to me, the trickster. I think I can be around a thousand years and never understand the process.