I had a fascination with 3D that goes back to the View-Master. I'd always dreamed of making a film in 3D. It's like a combination of theatre and film. There's something 3D gives to a movie that takes you to another land. Working with RealD creatively was a liberating experience. Thank you RealD for allowing us to make something like Hugo.

To me, where theater has it all over film is that it’s in the moment, it’s tactile, you feel it …You’re completely immersed in it — right here and right now.

Theatre is like broad brush painting, where you can go anywhere with your brush. But film is like painting with one of those little, pointy brushes, a stroke here and a stroke there. I love that as well. You have to internalise everything and get it right deep inside. And when you feel you get it right, it’s almost orgasmic! It’s a lovely experience.

He made the characters a lot more three-dimensional. It's still a 'B' movie and it's still kinda campy. Now it's these really well-developed characters, really three-dimensional.

sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. François Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theater, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience, turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: The audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are

I come from theater, and I love acting with my body. You get to do that an awful lot in theater, but you don’t get to do it as much in film because film is about the close-up generally. And theater is always by necessity in a wide shot.

All the movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.

Cinema takes me to another world. That world is authentic, real, and welcoming. Cinema doesn’t belong to the winner but to the loser/loner. The blissful loser. I like that world.

I wanted to be an actor or be a director since I was a very small child. I mean, my mother went into labor at a movie theater. There were, like, four movie theaters around us when I was growing up in Austin. Movies became my babysitter. I think I saw more films than I saw reality. Then I noticed something when I was in my late teens that really made my thinking shift in what I wanted to do with film. When I was watching a film as a young man, there would be a second or two when I drifted outside of myself. I noticed how for a moment, in the image and music and train of information, I was traveling through the film, leaving myself. And I knew that was something I wanted to do. I wanted to see how long I could make that feeling go on—if I could take someone outside themselves, outside their body for a minute, five minutes, maybe even 80 minutes, 90 minutes.

It [filmmaking] makes me feel like I'm able to bring stories to life, so it feels like you're there, It gives perspectives they've never seen before.

Sound and talking undoubtedly increase the entertainment value of a picture. There is a distinct conflict, however, between a pictorial and sound elements, which cannot be entirely avoided until third dimensional pictures are made.

No matter how small or large the budget, I always tried to make my movies look like movies. They’re always well cut, well framed, look good and have energy. Rodney and I developed that style, and I’ve always done it since then. I’ve been very lucky that way, because that’s how I’ve been able to survive being in Canada all these years.

Film-making encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelievably deceitful, and everything in between.

I want my movies to feel like you’re paratrooping into somebody’s life.