What character in a film or TV show are you jealous you didn't get to play?
I’m a lousy actor so I’m not jealous of any of them – except maybe the really good-looking ones like George Clooney or Johnny Depp!
Who in the business do you look to for inspiration, directly or indirectly?
I have so many favorite directors – the greats like Scorsese or Coppola or Robert Altman, who often bring a documentary-like reality to their work which I love. For similar reasons, I really like Steven Soderbergh’s work, from Sex, Lies and Videotape all the way to Erin Brockovich, and also Paul Greengrass, the British director, whose films about Bloody Sunday and United 92 are also so inspiring. I like set piece work too – Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom or Romeo and Juliet come to mind – and also very studied but beautifully realized films like Sam Mendes’ American Beauty and Jarhead. Before Heart, I directed a film about the last twenty-four hours before the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima – a very different subject from seniors singing rock n roll! – but I tried very hard to inject a documentary-style immediacy into the subject, as if cameras had actually been there on the plane, in the operations rooms, and on the ground in Hiroshima. Many of the directors I’ve cited came into play, whether consciously or not, when I made that film.
