Top 25 John Hillcoat Quotes

For all the spectacle of CGI, there’s something alien and unreal about that domain, like a videogame.

I have very mixed feelings about big corporations. Oftentimes, they’re more troublesome than not.

I kept hearing about this incredible guy called Tom Hardy. I started watching his work, and I was awestruck – he was amazing.

Everyone has a family, even if they’re at war or fallen apart. It’s the closest initial bond, and there’s a sort of primal element to that. Your primary relationships are formed out of family.

My own personal aesthetic is all to do with real actors and real locations and a kind of almost hyper reality and actuality to things. But the digital world, I explore that through other mediums, with music videos and commercials. Even ‘The Road‘ was a real learning curve for me with digital effects.

I’ve realized I’ve become a bit reactive to each film I do. After ‘The Road,’ I was desperate to do something that had color and warmth to it and a stronger sense of community.

Film has its own innate poetry.

I think it’s human nature that if we don’t have our own family, we will create a family, because it’s human nature, and it’s that element of trust and dependency and love and all of those sort of things.

I think what actors have to do, what performers have to do to emotionally get to that place and have a camera and have your face 20 feet high on a screen, is such an incredible thing.

I take very seriously that challenge of trying to do genre films – but elevated genre films.

I love the sci-fi movies where it’s from the point of view of humans in that situation… When it becomes too clever in its ideas, the cyber-punk, high-tech thing, it becomes more about something else.

We talk about that a lot: how, when you‘re under pressure, it brings out the best and the worst in people.

I like restraint. Even with actors, restraint is something that I work on the most.

Even on a large ensemble where their parts are relatively small – because having ten main characters obviously affects their screen time – the thing that attracts great actors is when there is that challenge to get some reality into something.

Comedy, I’m still in awe of. I think you need a comic genius somewhere in the mix. It’s got to be the actor or someone. But the ‘comic genius’ actors are the darkest people on the planet – and that kind of scares me!

Unfortunately, I’ve seen violence, and I think, in films, it is the dramatic extremity of it.

I don’t really play games and don’t know much about them, but my son certainly does.

Certain films, when shot digitally, the detail is like CG: you can’t feel the sweat. I feel like digital is alienating. There’s something superficial to digital compared to the richness of film.

I like to do commercials that are more than just flogging a product. It needs to have something to say. It’s always an opportunity for a director to say something substantial and interesting.

It’s not awards per se that bother me; it’s entirely to do with the impetus they give for marketing a film.

Any way you want to slice it, the thing about the apocalypse is, since the beginning of time, it’s the projection of mankind‘s worst fear. The day that, as a race, our number is up.

I like to keep a calm set.

I personally found ‘Avatar‘ – the blue people, to me, looked like painted art from the seventies. It didn’t have the realism as, say, the robotic machines.

It’s such an intense thing to make a film.

Radiohead showed a real affinity to being bold with visual imagery, so it came as no surprise when Jonny Greenwood did ‘There Will Be Blood.’