The "If you build it, they will come" approach to filmmaking has always been helpful to me.
This is such a cliche, but I feel like filmmaking is a collaborative experience.
The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.
The biggest lesson that I have learnt from everyone is that there are no rules in filmmaking.
I've had really great experiences working with first-time directors. They come at filmmaking with fresh ideas. I've been very lucky that way.
I sort of plunged into filmmaking. I decided I'd jump off the deep end, so I started thinking about what kind of a movie I should try to make.
[On filmmaking:] Cardinal rule: It's a youth business.
Wong Kar-Wai is a really great inspiration. He's always referred to as the Jimi Hendrix of filmmaking.
I love filmmaking because it's like harvesting as a farmer. I have an idea, I get the financing, I write the script and then cast and shoot and edit. Then there is opening night, and after that I get another idea.
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
When I was in college, my brother, B. R. Chopra, who is everything to me, was a director in Bombay. He taught me filmmaking. What I am today is because of him.
Obviously you have a responsibility - one would like to think there is such a thing as ethics in filmmaking.
Filmmaking is not a balancing act, although some directors think it is. I don't believe in it. I like ups and downs. They're the best way to translate my feelings to the screen.
Long, long before I became a filmmaker I was talking to killers. Filmmaking was an after thought.
Filmmaking is something I have to do. It's not something I particularly want to do.
I like challenges. If you're involved, as one is, in filmmaking, you want to challenge yourself. You don't want to repeat what you're done before.
It's a cliche that filmmaking is a team sport. However, let me say just say it again: filmmaking is a team sport.
Why I'm interested in filmmaking is because a moving image is very, very powerful when it comes to changing human behavior.
The field (of filmmaking) is suddenly sexy,. . . so it's deluged with these wannabes who say 'I don't want to be a secret agent, I'll be a filmmaker. ' I think a lot of people are really kind of naive.
I do think it's possible for me to go back to the studio, and for a lot of women filmmakers to be going back into studio filmmaking with a different sense of their own agency, and a different sense of the respect that they can command. When you asked the question about whether women want to be making big studio movies, the answer is almost always yes. It's just, how do they want to be treated? What is that experience going to be? And if you know the experience is gonna be shitty going into it, I personally am at a place where I'm not willing to punish myself any longer.