People have to identify with their own stories, with their own lives, so a movie belongs to a country and to a culture. Sometimes we can share, but it's very rare.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Movies are such an integral part of American culture. We're so spread out in this country, and movies offer us a chance to come together and have a communal experience.
Film is our literature, so we should tell stories that are apropos of our culture, in that we can learn something about ourselves.
Even some of us who make movies underestimate their influence abroad. American movies sell American culture. Foreigners want to see American movies. But that's also why so many foreign governments and groups object to them.
Movies are something people see all over the world because there is a certain need for it.
The American movie, in part because America's a melting pot, the cultural hodgepodge that America makes, generates movies that have appeal across all international boundaries. And that's really not true for most domestic film industries. It's no longer true of France and Italy, less true than it used to be of the U.K.
Movies can tell us about our place, or lack of place, in our culture.
I was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong.
Films, fiction, can encompass a whole global vision on a particular subject with any story, whatever it is. You can play the story in whatever country with whatever language in whatever style you want to tell the story in.
American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.
Movies are becoming more global, which is making them less intimate. If you make a movie for the world, you don't make it for any country.