Taylor Hackford
Taylor Hackford
Taylor Edwin Hackfordis an American film director and former president of the Directors Guild of America. He won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for Teenage Father. Hackford went on to direct a number of highly regarded feature films, most notably An Officer and a Gentlemanand Ray, the latter of which saw him nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and Academy Award for Best Picture...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth31 December 1944
CitySanta Barbara, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Our society gives power to people who are successful. All of a sudden, if you've created something unique and interesting, you're set apart.
It's all about the same thing, being able to pull people into a situation where you have a vision, and transport that vision off the page.
The SAS is the most elite of the special forces in the world. They are not people who go out and advertise; they keep it inside. They don't want anybody to know about them.
Show business is one of those things that people can use to get themselves out of the lower rung of society.
If people are worried about the size of their trailers, I kind of say their priorities are off.
I make films about working class people.
But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.
I make films about working class people. All my films have always been about that. For example, the brothel is a workplace. It's aberrant, but a workplace nonetheless. I was more interested as opposed to glamorizing and saying, oh, this is a great erotic place, it's a place of business. The commodity is sex.
Because when you have millions of people with this kind of need for gratification, and the culture is saying that it's possible for everyone to satisfy all of their needs and desires all of the time, there are obviously going to be clashes - clashes of ego.
That whole process of somebody who has all that charisma and talent, to be able to break through and make it in America is fabulous.
But Bruckheimer didn't wilt. He said just do it without them. The great thing for me is that Jerry Bruckheimer and his team gave me all the help I needed and then they left me alone.
I'm always interested in the working class people. I am one. They're subjugated, they're paid very little and they can make it in show biz.
I trusted my instincts here, but I'm not stupid. The next thing I did was throw him into the shark tank, ... I threw him in with Ray Charles.
When you're working in Hollywood you have these actors who go to their trailers, they're getting paid millions of dollars, they act like spoiled children. They don't really want to work. And the crew knows that. They don't respect them, ... Jamie Foxx is the antithesis of that.