Mark Romanek

Music videos were this lucky career opportunity. They were assignments. I was providing a service, and they were meant to be punchy and gimmicky and fun.

The trick is falling in love with something enough, and being excited enough by something, to want to make that year and a half or two year commitment and wake up every morning at 5 to go deal with a whole day full of problems to get it up on the screen. You really need passion.

I always wanted to be a feature filmmaker and tried to treat that experience as some sort of elite film school where I could learn the craft, and got paid to learn the craft.

Actually, the British boarding school experience turns out to be not that exotic.

I err on the side of a kind of optimistic agnostic sense that there's something that put us all here - some energy or something that we are not in a position to understand.

I think that I've learned to relax, and trust in and hire very talented people, and trust in their abilities a little more.

I do believe that there are auteurs, in the sense that there are filmmakers with very strong voices and their voices are communicated on to the screen without a lot of compromise.

From a personal standpoint, I'd say that, yeah, seeing how quickly children grow, you realize how fast life goes by.