Joe Dante Quotes

I think I entered the market around the time when there was getting to be less snobbery about the difference between feature films and television. I think there's been a lot more receptivity on television to interesting adult stories that in the '60s and '70s would have been made into feature films. I have no problem jumping back and forth. If anything, I find it less restrictive working in television.

I think that anybody that wants to direct, particularly writers, should spend some time in an editing room, whether it's a film of theirs or someone else's, or shoot their own picture on video and cut it.

Editing is kind of a solitary job.

The dynamic is extremely similar to Gremlins and the hero is very similar, plus the small town atmosphere. It really is in a way the third Gremlins movie.

I'm always looking for films, but the horror scripts that I get tend to be very repetitive and often not that interesting.

Repetitiveness is one of the things that's most difficult to get away from in genre pictures, because people come specifically to see certain kinds of things but get disappointed if they're presented in the same way. So to try to find a new way to show old stuff is always the challenge.

I love 'Evil Dead 2!' Who doesn't love 'Evil Dead 2?

It's very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.

You do form a cadre of people that you trust and who are good at their jobs and who know you and what your quirks and foibles are. It makes making movies very collegial and a lot more fun.

There's so little difference between television and features as far as you make the film. I mean, you have less money and it's a little quicker, but the concept is all on television.

Daffy, of course, wants to go on the journey with him but the studio decides they want Daffy back, so Bugs and a young studio executive heroine have to go out and try to bring him back.

I mean, movies are all geared to be basically under 25, and they're all tentpoles, explosions, excitement and all that - they take advantage of the big screen, which is great.

I think Pans Labyrinth is genius.

Finding a writer who can write decent kids' dialog and finding kids that can act realistically and not 'cute' is an effort.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

So I've always been kind of an apocalyptic kind of kid, and looking back at the movies I've done, there's some kind of apocalypse in them. So that must be what scares me... besides Republicans.

There's a way of thinking that comes with being an editor that is incredibly useful on the set. It's not just a vocabulary thing or a right-to-left thing or script supervisor stuff. It's a way of thinking about the film and the shots and the way they fit together, what you need and what you don't need, and what you can get away with if you have to.

When the first movie to show the anger people have about the war is a grade Z zombie movie, that tells you all you need to know about how afraid of ruffling anyone's feathers people in the movie business are today.

I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

I've made a lot of movies with kids in them. I don't know why that is, but it's something I've noticed.

If you're doing a family movie, you don't want it to be stupid. Farting chihuahuas is not my idea of entertainment for kids or adults. So you try to make a movie that adults can see on one level, and kids can see on another.

Movies cost so much that studios really try to impose their personality over yours. A lot of times, you can get swallowed up in that and end up making movies that are indistinguishable from anybody else's. One of the things I've always tried to do is to inject myself as much as possible into the movie, so I feel like it's mine. But that also comes from what you choose to do and what you choose not to do. There are certain projects I could have said yes to, and I know exactly how they would have turned out: exactly the way they turned out when someone else did them.

I go to a lot of independents and foreign films. I really try to keep up and see what there is to see. If you really love movies, it's the act of watching them that you really love. You can sit and watch a B-Western and have just as much fun watching that as you can a classic. That minute when the lights go down is the part where the magic happens, because you know this could be great. You're always kind of excited, like, "Here I am again in the church of movies, and Mass is starting.".

Editing is where movies are made or broken. Many a film has been saved and many a film has been ruined in the editing room.

What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I don't know how long that's going to last.

Avatar' is the greatest, most comprehensive collection of movie cliches ever assembled, but it's put together in a brand new way with a new technology, and tremendous imagination, making it a true epic and a kind of a milestone.

It's a lot of power to give the director to edit his own stuff. It's also a time thing: you don't want to have to wait for the guy to finish shooting before he starts editing.

When you make a 3-D movie you actually have to plan the way the visuals look because there's a parallax issue, and there's an issue of editing, you can't edit very quickly in 3-D because the eye won't adjust fast enough for it.

There go the goddamn brownies!

Movies get found in the editing room. The movie that you make is not always necessarily the movie that comes out of the editing room. The trick is to perfect the movie that you have and make it the best version of what you've shot, regardless of what the intent may have been.

One of the things I've always tried to do is to inject myself as much as possible into the movie, so I feel like it's mine.

My generation remembered going to the movies as an event. We would see these things, we would bring them home, and we would think about them for years because it would take a long time before they would go on television where you could re-experience the fun that you had when you watched them.

A lot of filmmakers from my generation were lucky enough to have their work more or less perpetuated by people who saw them originally on TV and on HBO and certainly on home video.

I don't believe that you can judge the worth of a movie in the atmosphere in which it comes out the first time. There's just so many reasons why some pictures don't catch on.

I like working with kid actors because they surprise you constantly. I mean, all actors do - but kids particularly.

When I was growing up in the '60s I would have thought that westerns would last forever.

I grew up in New Jersey and my father was a golf pro, so I was groomed for sports, but I wasn't very good, so my interests lay elsewhere.

When filmmakers are kept from making films, there's a lot of different reasons why. Sometimes you work on a film and cast it and do all the work and can be just a month away from shooting, and all of a sudden, the whole thing goes up in smoke. But I do think the advent of a digital revolution is going to provide people with opportunities to make films that they never would have had before. I think you can do some pretty credible stuff now with very, very little money. Which I think is great for young filmmakers.