There's a side of me that always fell for manic things, frenzied, cartoony performances. I always liked sideshows, freakshows. Jerry Lewis was a freakshow...Absolutely grotesque, awful, tasteless. I like things to be tasteless.
People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want.
All I do is hunt. I want to be thrilled. And I'm not being thrilled at the moment. So I'm being old and bitter and curmudgeonly, because I want sensory buzz and I'm not getting it!
I do want to say things in these films. I want audiences to come out with shards stuck in them. I don't care if people love my films or walk out, as long as they have a strong response.
My problem is I'm like a junkie. I want a good movie fix, and I never get that fix. I want to be taken into some place, some world, some idea that I haven't thought of or imagined. And it doesn't happen.
(on future use of CGI in his films) Nooo! Leave that to George Lucas, he' s really mastered the CGI acting. That scares me! I hate it! Everybody is so pleased and excited by it. Animation is animation. Animation is great. But it's when you're now taking what should be films full of people, living thinking, breathing, flawed creatures and you're controlling every moment of that, it's just death to me. It's death to cinema, I can't watch those Star Wars films, they're dead things.
Everybody has their opinion and some people are wrong. One of the things I enjoy about my films is that children really love them. They are open-minded. As we get older we seem to close in. We limit the size of the world we limit everything about it.
I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg - I don't usually admit this publicly - because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather simplistic. What I want to do is take whatever cinema is considered normal or successful at a particular time and play around with it - to use it as a way of luring audiences in.
It's hard for me to worry about the studios losing money. I'm not very sympathetic to their money problems, because they certainly haven't been sympathetic to mine.
(On news of Heath Ledger's death while filming "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus"):
We were devastated. We spent the whole day - Amy Gilliam, Nicola Pecorini, the director of photography, and myself - lying flat on the floor. Heath Ledger's dead, and you don't quite get over that.
I suppose I'm in an interesting position because while I'm cutting the film I'm basically working with him every day and he's fine; he's in good shape. Ideas are floating around. Then finally we decided, 'OK, let's get three other people to take over the part'. And we were lucky because we have a magic mirror in this movie. Not every movie has a magic mirror.
So you can very genuinely say that these other actors are different aspects of the character that Heath plays. And it works.
The point was, we've got to keep going. It was a bit like half being there, but apparently on autopilot I can still do a few things.
Nobody went to see "Tideland"! I was hoping people would get angry about it but those that saw it didn't want to talk about it. This is the world we're living in, people don't want to discuss things that are actually worth discussing.
The reason why I don't watch as many as I used to is that I'm not surprised any more. I loved movies because they opened up doors into worlds I never imagined. It seldom happens now.
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