Quotes from John Hillcoat

I like restraint. Even with actors, restraint is something that I work on the most.

Radiohead showed a real affinity to being bold with visual imagery, so it came as no surprise when Jonny Greenwood did 'There Will Be Blood.'

The Globes are voted for by anyone in L.A. who's ever written for a foreign newspaper or magazine. That means, like, Romanian cookery writers.

I've learned a lot about getting film sensibilities on digital.

It's not awards per se that bother me; it's entirely to do with the impetus they give for marketing a film.

I think what actors have to do, what performers have to do to emotionally get to that place and have a camera and have your face 20 feet high on a screen, is such an incredible thing.

I love 'Alien' and 'Blade Runner' and '2001.'

When you're working with an ensemble, I think you really need different energies because you don't have much time with each character to make them feel real. You want strong personalities that are very different.

It's great to make strong, powerful films, but in terms of people wanting to finance them, it's also very difficult.

I've realized I've become a bit reactive to each film I do. After 'The Road,' I was desperate to do something that had color and warmth to it and a stronger sense of community.

I like to keep a calm set.

I love the sci-fi movies where it's from the point of view of humans in that situation... When it becomes too clever in its ideas, the cyber-punk, high-tech thing, it becomes more about something else.

When you have a major movie star, and then they're surrounded by local extras, it takes me out or makes me more conscious of what's going on, as opposed to losing myself in the movie.

Certain films, when shot digitally, the detail is like CG: you can't feel the sweat. I feel like digital is alienating. There's something superficial to digital compared to the richness of film.

Everyone has a family, even if they're at war or fallen apart. It's the closest initial bond, and there's a sort of primal element to that. Your primary relationships are formed out of family.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

I love those sorts of stories where you actually see the consequences of what violence does physically to people as well as psychologically.

What I like is finding new angles on genres.

I personally found 'Avatar' - the blue people, to me, looked like painted art from the seventies. It didn't have the realism as, say, the robotic machines.

I think the environment is the biggest threat mankind has ever faced.

In Australia in the '70s, there was a real embrace of different genres. And then George Miller did 'Mad Max' by the end of the '70s, the beginning of the '80s. And it was really thriving.

There is a capacity for violence we all harbour, and under certain circumstances, it comes out.

Even on a large ensemble where their parts are relatively small - because having ten main characters obviously affects their screen time - the thing that attracts great actors is when there is that challenge to get some reality into something.

I think it's human nature that if we don't have our own family, we will create a family, because it's human nature, and it's that element of trust and dependency and love and all of those sort of things.