Gavin Hood Quotations

What's genius about 'Gravity' is that you are close upon the actors, but 3D works best when you have foreground, middle ground and background.

Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance.

'Ender's Game' has fabulous opportunities for spectacle, where appropriate, but there's also a tremendous central character. It's a balance.

I learned a lot doing 'Wolverine,' and I was also very fortunate, in the sense that I got to do a huge number of visual effects shots.

I was drafted when I was 17, and I spent two years, and I lost a friend in war.

My tools, my medium, include pictures and live actors.

Part of what's so tricky in a film that's two hours long is how many themes can you effectively explore.

When we watch stories, we learn empathy, we learn compassion, and hopefully we achieve some sort of understanding.

For me, emotion comes first. If I have to change a scene, invent a scene, change dialogue, or put Graff by the lake in order to feel that dynamic, and the end results feels like 'Ender's Game,' then hopefully it works.

I don't know many South Africans who don't have their eyes wide open to what it's like to be exposed to some sort of violence. The question is whether we choose to be cynical about it or not.

I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted 'Tsotsi,' so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.

In the comic-book lore, of course, you mutate post a traumatic event. You must have the mutant gene, but if something traumatic happens to you, usually at puberty, then that mutation manifests itself.

In the early '90s, I was hired to write educational dramas about HIV and AIDS in the shantytowns. I did that for two and a half years, and then I was hired on other films. When 'Tsotsi' presented itself, I thought, 'This is not a world I grew up in, but I've spent a great deal of time writing about it and researching it in my past.'

Most big popcorn movies are 'bad guy does something to good guy, good guy gets revenge on bad guy, sets the world right, and moves on.' And 'Ender's Game' is just not that simple, so it's an exciting challenge. It's a little terrifying, and let's see how audiences respond.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

The reality is that art has often risen to greater heights than the people who created it. Many flawed artists have created great works of art. You have to decide if you are going to listen to Richard Wagner's music or not because he was very anti-Semitic.

The truth about people at every economic level of life is you get those who are kind and who are not, those who are greedy, whether they be rich or poor. That's a common thread through humanity on any street you go to.

There's always a theme I'm drawn to, that we humans are not good or bad. We're all a mixture of both. We can have great compassion or commit great violence.

We grew up watching American films and I hope that Americans will watch our stories.

When you buy a ticket and when you buy a genuine DVD, you are an investor in South African film as your money is going back to people who invest in local films.

One of the struggles and one of the exciting things for South African filmmakers is: What stories are we allowed to tell? I hope for the industry that more and more, it will tell whatever stories it likes.

I was frozen in my seat. It was the first time I had ever seen people like me on the screen.

I feel very, very proud to hold this (Oscar) because it tells me, and all of us at home, that we can do it.

I want to thank my fellow nominees, who I've become deep friends with. We may have foreign-language films, but our stories are the same as your stories. They're about the human heart and emotion.

Our stories are the same as your stories. They're about the human heart and emotion.

My parents have been car-jacked. I have been mugged. We all know what it is like. But do you write a story about the way it is, or the way it should, or could, or needs to be?

We arranged a meeting in Los Angeles with big name stars, but I had to drop the idea. I wanted to film in the local Soweto dialect that only Soweto youth can speak and believed that shooting in any other language would dilute the impact of the film.

Without what you did, we would not have been able to make this film together as South Africans in a free country.

We are excited to be in Cape Town.

Although it seems to be a ghetto movie, it very quickly becomes a much more intimate story, the story of this young, teenage, lost, crazy, out-of-control kid and a baby that he hides from his friends.

You don't want to make a big deal out of it because it sounds indulgent. But the fact of the matter is that, for all South African filmmakers, because we don't make a lot of films, you feel an unrealistic pressure that your film has to say so much and has to be about everything in South Africa.

This may sound melodramatic but I have never, ever worked so hard. The film will be released in a different country every week for the next six weeks. I've just come back from Germany, France and Sweden to be in LA for the nominations and to speak to the American press.

It's a rough mess, so anyone who buys it is getting a poor-quality version.

The first question after every screening is, 'Where can I buy the soundtrack?', and that definitely helps the movie.

You have to separate artistic ability from ethnic origin. Not only am I not black, I am also not a woman, therefore how can I direct women? I am also only 42, therefore how can I direct someone who's 60? So you see where the argument ends up? If you take it to its logical conclusion, I would have to walk around and point a video camera at myself. And who the hell is interested in that?

I am a story-teller working with a craft. My job is to use my craft - which is a different thing to my race - and tell a story well.

I think if you read the story as bad guy turns good guy, then clearly it is a cliché. But my experience, when I spent three years working with young people in the townships on issues principally around HIV/AIDS, is that people are usually neither entirely good or bad. They are usually variations of both. Just because someone is a carjacker doesn't mean they are a ruthless cold-blooded murderer.

Having been in the military myself, there is an awful moment when you're in this moment of conflict.

One reads many scripts, and some of them are good and some of them are not, but every now and then, one really grabs you. You simply can't put it down.

And for the people who promote drones as the answer to everything, there is a danger from being distanced from the reality of the ugly mess of war.

The question becomes, because we're remotely far away from the territory we're about to bomb, does it make it easier to do it? That it is an important question, and the military is asking those questions.

When I see big movies that are only about good versus evil, and the good guy wins, I only can think we're in a far more complicated world than that. I frankly think that this binary philosophy is actually a dangerous way to look at the world.

Hany Abu-Assad was sitting next to me, and his film 'Paradise Now' had won the Golden Globe. He said to me at the Globes, 'Paradise now, talk to you later.' [laughs] I gave him a big hug for that.