I’ve done a lot of dramedies in my career. You know, I started as a standup comic, and then the movies that I was doing, like ‘Up Side of Anger’ were kind of like – they’re hard. They’re hard to sell; they’re hard to get made, you know.
I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.
I realized this is what God has dealt me, and I should be thankful considering all that’s happened to me in my life, but MS caused the movies to stop – stop dead – and I miss it.
For me, Santa was white, and he was in Coca Cola commercials. You never saw a black Santa on TV and in movies, and when you did, it was usually a bum with a Santa hat, or a bunch of jewelry.
When I was growing up, the top movies dealt with grown-up, complex emotions.
Films with predominantly white casts can come in any form, tell any story, big or small. For black films, you have the light, fluffy rom-coms or ‘Madea’ movies, and then you have the black-torture awards movie.
‘Atonement’ is one of my all-time favourite movies.
If I showed you scripts from my first few movies, the descriptions of my characters all said ‘the ugly girl’.
I’m in a kind of weird position where I want to prove that I can do smaller movies.
We did Holy Grail, and I got my name up there as one of the directors. After that, I started moving more and more down the line I wanted to, which was making movies.
People forget that I am the granddaughter of a person named Nanabhai Bhatt, who had made more than 150 odd films. He was the person to introduce the double role phenomenon in Indian movies.
I remember being scared to death of horror movies as a kid. Sometimes, I missed the whole movie because I was so scared and couldn’t look.
Some movies to me are like vampires – they suck all of the energy out of me and I don’t like that. I like to give the audience energy if I can.
How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.
It might sound unconvincing when an actor like me who has done 500 films says that television is more competitive than movies, but that is the plain truth.
I don’t have a lot of patience for movies that aren’t cleanly told.
Cinema Paradiso, because it reminds me of why I make movies, the magic of movies, the romance of movies.
The unicorns happened because I legitimately enjoy unicorns; as a kid, one of my favorite movies was called ‘The Last Unicorn.’
And then after a while he got me a job at the video store next door. I used to lock up the store and go next door and hang out all the time and watch movies and stuff.
I didn’t really want to act. Gerard Depardieu discovered me when I was 14 and asked if I wanted to make movies and I said, ‘Why not?’
My best friend, who I grew up with in Paris, is Indian. So, I’ve grown up listening to a lot of Bollywood songs and watching a lot of Bollywood movies, old and new.
I’m kind of like the goofy number-seven guy in a lot of movies.
I like thrillers. My style of movies are closer to thrillers.
I just want to sing, I want to work on my music, I want to make my movies, that’s all I want to do.
I know that movies are basically meant to be entertainment, but I’m not that interested in entertainment.
