'The Squid and the Whale' I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
See, 'A Time to Kill' was the one I got famous off of. Big ka-boom, over one weekend. After that, I did films that I really wanted to do.
I've never done a movie that's shot more than 40 days because I just don't do those kinds of films.
I did nine months in 'Mrs. Klein' in New York, then four months on the road. Then I did a movie directed by Philip Haas, who did 'Angels & Insects'. We shot 'The Blood Oranges' in Mexico for six weeks.
You have twenty-one days to shoot a whole movie and sometimes you go into that thinking 'ugh, this could potentially be really, really difficult' and it turns out to be the most incredible experience.
I'm lucky if I find one movie a year that's worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.
'Little Miss Sunshine' snowballed. It was a tiny movie. We shot it in 30 days, and it was really fun to do, but it was one of those small movies that you don't hold out huge hope for.
'Jaws' was the definitive filmmaking turning point for me. It came out in the summer of '75 and I saw it an obsessive 55 times. They even ran a very embarrassing article about me in the local paper, about the weird kid who's seen 'Jaws' 55 times.
I filmed underwater for two days in the open ocean with dolphins.
I was watching Monster's Ball, which is a fabulous movie. It's just a little gem: beautifully shot, and shot in a way I never would have done. It made me feel very old, really, because it wasn't eccentric for its own sake, it was just very original.
I did this film for less money than it costs to stay in this hotel. We shot it in 20 days. We couldn't screw up takes for fun because we didn't have enough film.