- [on being a production designer] This is ideal for me because I draw well and I can visualize. There's no other area I would prefer to be working in.
- I like films that use cinema as the way of fundamentally expressing the points they're trying to make, rather than then expressing a literary piece on film.
- Tim Burton is firm in his opinion that film must have its own reality. The more you explain the more you have to explain. If you start explaining you have to explain loads and that gets off the event you're actually reconstructing. Look at a Disney cartoon. Everybody buys that Donald Duck was steamrolled flat.
- I develop a context for the film which will be spiritually or tonally correct. I don't agree with the idea of trying to reconstruct a reference shot of something from some period. I believe in looking at the film and then thinking in the abstract. And then constructing your own reality to support that general abstract idea of the whole piece.
- The Batmobile was more like a knight in armor, an extension, an expression of Batman's costume-an intimidating, furious war machine.
- Equal rights, equal opportunity, equal everything, but let them wear a skirt or let them be women.
- On Batman (1989): "One dresses up as a bat at night and the other runs around in whiteface with green hair. We had to turn the whole film into this extraordinary fantasy land of its own to let these things occur."
- It's seldom that you see a film that's got absolute integrity from front to back. The Last Emperor (1987) had integrity from front to back, in its stylistic approach. It was cinematographic, had wonderful acting and sustained three and a half hours of pure integrity. I like people who use the actual art form of cinema: Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Tim Burton. It's like, come and have a look at this event.
- England is not the be-all and end-all. I happen to have been brought up and educated there, but I'm not English. My father's Russian, my mother's French. I like it, but I don't like Margaret Thatcher's England. She's killed the culture of the country dead. It's much more interesting here [in the US] right now.
- All of Stanley Kubrick's films are about the frailty of the human condition in extreme circumstances.
- I don't like to look too hard at references. I just look enough to know where to go from and how far I can go. Otherwise, you get hung up on detail. It's much better to go for the broad stroke.
- The strength of your graphic imagery is incredibly important. You must really ram it home hard and fast 'cause you ain't got time to go to it like in a book. It's a two hour job, it ain't a couple of days. You've got to really take 'em in. But it has to be honest to the feel of the thing.
- If you do a film with Stanley Kubrick and survive it - two years that was - it tends to put you at the top of the shit heap. If you can handle it with Kubrick then they think you can handle anything because he's 44 times more difficult than anybody else.
- I am not an exponent of Cinema Verite. That's not what you can do with cinema.
- About The Company of Wolves (1984): It's a pubescent girl's dreams and fantasies told by a cautionary aunt played by Angela Lansbury. It was designed like a fairy story - little villages in the woods. We were trying to develop something which was the fantasy of a child, a dreamworld with its own reality. It was different from anything else coming out at that period. It needed a magical feeling about it because it was magic. Remember the wolf coming out of the guy's mouth? I always regard Neil Jordan's scripts as a form of poetry.
- About Stanley Kubrick: He hates making movies cause he's got to go out of his house. I'd say it's similar to Howard Hughes. Megalomania. He's intensely shy and awkward, increasingly so. He works with the smallest crews. He has to be in an intense, small unit and then he's happy. But he is lucky because he has a wonderful home life. He adores his wife and family and he loves his dogs and cats and all that is lovely. I'm not sorry for him because he can actually enjoy the way he wants to live his life. He only has to make a movie every six years - in his case. He's a formidable intellect, a huge mind - prodigiously bright - if the word genius applies to anybody, there's an element of that in him. I think he's the best lighting and camera man in the world.
- New York is something which can sustain you for six months of being on location. I hate location movies in the middle of nowhere, they send me crazy. It all sounds great, I'm going to the Seychelles for six months and after three weeks, you think, "Four and a half months of this fucking place and I've already been to every restaurant?"
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