The reason I took Early Edition - besides the fact that I liked it - was that it enabled me to start a production company in New York City. It's a low-budget film company to produce and direct movies.
I love the film route and I'm gong to try my hardest to stay on it.
I started writing this feature comedy in New York - a Chris Farley vehicle. The script was decent. When I got to LA, I met some new friends in film school and had them read my script and give me notes.
Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's bad. I think the film could have been a lot better.
Only after awhile. After it came out and people began to engage in discussions about the social reflections of the film that I realized it had an importance I hadn't thought of.
If he didn't fall in love he would have never come back near the end of the film. Because, what man is going to dishonor himself so that he comes back in front of the man that took a woman away from him... and warns her to save her life?
I'm not so sure that younger people today really appreciate the enormous bravery that went into the creation and production of that film, or how important a film at the time it really was.
After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.
First, you do a piece of material that begins and ends and has a flow; it's not chopped up as in a film, where in an extreme case you might be doing the last scene of the script the first day that you go to work, and you don't know enough about the character you're playing.
Although you have some films that are a real bummer, there's always a film that comes up where it's just heaven.
My favorite film is Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power in The Razor's Edge.
It's a word called symbiotic, you send the messages and it comes back in return. Together, it's a wonderful thing, it's why television is so great and film can never reach.
I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.
Actually, after the release of the Bond film, the producers came back to me to offer me another one, but I didn't have any juice left for an immediate encore.
You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.