My father would schedule meetings over breakfast. Film-makers such as Rakesh Roshan and Prakash Jha have seen me as a child run around the house.
There is anxiety, but it comes after you've finished filming because it's out of your hands; people are editing it, they're cutting it, marketing it. And it's... part your career sort of rides on that. But when you're actually filming it's a team thing and it really feels good there for me.
When I see someone filming me, I don't usually think, 'No, man, don't put this up online!' I'd think, 'Hey man, you don't get to go to shows very often, put down the camera and enjoy it!' I love going to theatre and to shows so much.
When I was filming, I imagined that Legolas was a meditative character who was very thoughtful and had a certain amount of depth to him. I started working on trying to find this focus that Legolas has, which wasn't really like me.
I don't really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be considered an American filmmaker. If I'm doing something and it seems to me to be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo.
I've been to Sundance eight times as a publicist and thought I was very prepared. I mean, who could've been more prepared for me? A publicist who's been there eight times. Getting there as a filmmaker was a completely surreal, different, unexpected experience.
To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.
How I'm portrayed in films has more to do with the filmmaking and what they need in the story than anything else. I'm the same person I've always been, I just get used in different ways according to the filmmakers' needs - which is fine with me; it makes for great films.
I'm not one of those actors where filmmakers that I admire ask me to be in their movies. I meet them at parties and they're nice to me, but they never ask me to work with them.
Initially, it would bother me when filmmakers, script writers, dialogue writers and choreographers tried to recreate a bit of my dad though me.
A lot of people are trying to get out of their home country and think 'making it' is if you're able to work in another. For me... I'd be quite content to keep doing my own little films down there for the rest of my filmmaking career.
I'm sure I can make a movie that doesn't feel like a seventies movie! But the truth is, that's my favorite era in American filmmaking. To me, those were the great years.
After working for a while, I realized that acting was only satisfying about 30 percent of what interested me about the filmmaking process. Somewhere around age seventeen, I started to realize that if I'm very particular about the people I work with, then I can have the best sort of master class possible.
My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.
The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.
To me the recognition of the audience is part of the filmmaking process. When you make a movie, it's for them.
The key for me with 'Star Wars' is to stay in their world. Don't get in the way of what is already known and what works. I think of the basic nature of the filmmaking process that worked so well for the original trilogy. No stylistic flights of fancy for the sake of showing off. Tell the story, get the shot, get the performances, and move on.
My father never kissed me, hugged me or told me that he loved me. As my only living parent, he became the filter through which I saw myself, the possibilities for my life, the world and all men. He was a conflicted and dark filter.
People talk about balance. Balance is an awful measure of things because it implies a scale that inevitably tips. I like to look through the filter of, 'Is the life I'm leading consistent with my priorities?' For me, my family is the ultimate litmus test.
I am not a doctor or a scientist, but merely a passionate layperson, a filter, a messenger. I spoke with so many patients who are living normal, happy, fulfilled lives, and their enthusiasm and great quality of life convinced me that you can indeed live with cancer.
