Quotes About Hollywood

Making African American films are hard in Hollywood. We need to rely on a support network and bring more cohesion to different filmmakers, actors, producers etc. It's a very difficult business. There aren't a lot of Africans Americans or people of color in high positions in Hollywood that we can green-light films.

What about the accusation that Hollywood is trying to advance its liberal agenda? Well, the fact is, while the creative community admittedly leans left, Hollywood has become a corporate town.

It's very difficult to get any movies done about Black heroes - Haitian or American - in Hollywood. The argument in Hollywood is that there is no market for those movies, and that is not true.

I think Hollywood is incredibly segregated. I've never seen any place like it. The gatekeepers who are the most progressive activists inspired to make the world better... they're better people, right? They're segregated. It's self segregated in some cases, but there's nobody Black in charge of anything in Hollywood.

It's a fact, the majority of films in Hollywood are from the male perspective. And the female characters, very rarely do they get to speak to another female character in a movie, and when they do it's usually about a guy, not anything else. So they're very male-centric, Hollywood films, in general. So I think it's incredible that Ned Benson, when I said I'd love to know where she goes, says okay, I'm going to write another film from the female perspective.

I have not walked away from Hollywood. I'm walking away from the way I personally did business in Hollywood. The budget of whatever movie I do needs to be efficient; it needs to consider what kind of resources we're using and how to be as responsible as possible.

I've been fortunate to have had the life I had prior to Hollywood. I wasn't starving, I was going to eat the next day. I came to Hollywood wanting a career that had longevity, and I wasn't afraid to take risks because I had a dollar in the bank. I wasn't driven by money as much as I was driven by making a successful transition. And I was smart enough to know that I certainly didn't have all the answers and I needed to surround myself with smart people and be willing to take risks and be willing to fail.

Most people grow up dreaming of going to Hollywood and some of them work and work and work and finally end up in Hollywood.

Back in the Bruce Lee era, and in my era, Kung-Fu stirred up a kind of frenzy, and many people were learning martial arts from us. But about a decade ago, Hollywood began bringing in a number of our action choreographers, including two from my own stunt crew, where they became martial arts directors. Now, a decade later, Hollywood has learned it all, so when you look at the action films they're making now, they all use our action, our martial arts, and then add to that their own technology which is ten times better than ours, and it has to leave us dumbfounded: how did they film that?

Working with David Cronenberg or Darren Aronofsky or even Steven Soderbergh isn't really like a typical Hollywood movie. These are true artists, and have a certain amount of freedom when they work, and they're more like independent filmmakers making their way through big studios. I still don't feel like I've been part of the stereotypical Hollywood system.

It just kind of continues to be strange and interesting to me to try to understand what other people are looking for. And this also just comes from getting older. You look at the stuff certainly that's coming out of Hollywood these days, and you go, "Did what came out of Hollywood when I was a kid make more sense, or was it just that I was in the demographic then?" But I certainly feel increasingly confused and disconnected from it.

Once you got Hollywood doing these kinds of movies and having all the, how you say, the tools to do it, and also to keep on finding new ways of doing it becomes - Hollywood can be avant garde on what concerns action.

I don't want my dad to say, 'My daughter is an actress on a TV show.' I want him to say, 'My daughter cares about people.' I would love to know that I'm a role model in Hollywood.

Politics is different than movies. Politics are controlled by leaders. Leaders of every country have different interests. And they try to explain to their people why they should take one side or the other side. But in the movie its doing the opposite. It allows you to have a Universal Experience. You don't watch it as politics but as a movie. You don't have different reactions all over. It's so universal a language. It's not a political language serving a political agenda. The language of cinema is a world language. With the Hollywood movie, it brings about the same reaction wherever it goes.

What I've learned, more than anything, as a young actor who has been in the business for 10 years, is just to be around guys and girls, like Ron Perlman, Bill Lucking, Kim Coates, Tommy Flanagan, Katey Sagal, who have been in this business for a very long time, and to learn what to do and what not to do from them, every day, and to see how they navigate through their Hollywood life.

I'm not going to say I'm a big girl. I'm a very small person, but I'm a healthy weight. That might be a little weird for Hollywood.

You know how Hollywood is: They just follow suit.

For whatever reason, that dream I had of going to Hollywood never went away. But when I got to LA at just 19 years of age, my faith was the foundation that gave me the confidence that I needed to believe that it would all work out and was a reason for the open and closed doors. Today, my faith is the center of my career.

There's more to life than being an actor in a Hollywood movie. I'm not going to adapt my life after that existence, where a lot of people do. And they get the publicist, and they get all that stuff, and it becomes them. I think it's a stupid way to live your life. A really dumb way to live your life.

A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star onscreen is a gun aimed at a 12- or 14-year-old.

You get so afraid of failure and so afraid of losing and so afraid of not being the best that it's not a natural drive - it's born out of fear of failure. Which helps in Hollywood.

I'm tired of playing little girls. I'm a woman now. I can't run around forever being the Little Miss Fix It who bursts into song. I want to get out of Hollywood and get a fresh approach.

I've chosen not to live in Hollywood, and instead I live in Brooklyn, New York. It's how I like to live. I'd rather hang out with my kids and family when I'm not working. Going to premieres is not my idea of a fun night out.

Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.

It's certainly a difficult time right now to try to make small, smart films. I'm not trying to be self-serving, but you get to Hollywood, and if you want to make something big and loud and dumb, it's pretty easy.

It bothers me when the Hollywood elite are all so against people having guns and want rigorous gun restrictions.

I think that Hollywood should also be influenced by directors from Hong Kong. You see how Quentin Tarantino is really the example of how you can develop, and how you can go ahead if you accept the existence of different cinematic cultures. There you have Quentin playing with kung-fu. That's why the independents are the most interesting.

I was born in Connecticut. But my parents brought my sister and I to L.A. when-Hollywood, actually, when i was 6 months old.

The Hollywood I know has allowed me the opportunity after opportunity to keep doing new things and not send me out to pasture. I don't want to go to pasture. It's cold. I'm allergic to grass. And the cows are mean.

There's nothing nicer than coming back to your village, where people like my mum's friends take the mick out of me. I prefer that to the craziness of Hollywood.

I think my music is great for film, but I don't have the opportunity, or goesche to go and pitch myself to Hollywood.

I was just excited by the whole prospect of working in a television series in Hollywood. I had never anticipated that as an actor I would ever end up here. It may be some sort of fantasy I'd thought about from time to time, but it was completely unrealistic.

The difference between the extras here and in France is the French extras read books. Actually, they hide the book and pretend that they're acting. Here (in Hollywood), you can see everybody wants his break.

I'm an actress, I live in L.A., I work in Hollywood. But I've learned that if you're too skinny, they'll say something about it. If you're not skinny enough, they'll say something about it. I just try to feel good in my own skin as much as I can.

I would definitely like to continue my career in Hollywood, work hard and do my best.

I'm just a pack mule. I've played leads and I've played character roles. Any actress in Hollywood will tell you as your age climbs, the leads thin.

With action in Hollywood, a choreographer will be hired to design an amazing fight, with all these cool little narrative bits, such as a fighter having to perform a certain move because he's been injured and can only move that way, but it can all get lost in translation because the director then does what he wants with it and then passes it on to the editor, who does his interpretation of the fight. It becomes almost like Chinese whispers, so sometimes the end fight you see on film is so different to how it was conceived and looked on the day.

I don't go to a lot of parties or do a lot of going out within, like, the Hollywood circle or celebrity-type circles and things like that.

What is the thing that Hollywood demands most? Sincerity. No place in the world will pay such a high price for this admirable trait

Mother loathed the all-black B movies Hollywood made for the "colored" audience, where the stereotypes were broader and more offensive to her, and where the musical interludes did no justice to real talent, she said, but trivialized it.

I hated Hollywood. It’s a town without pity. Only success counts. I know of no other place in the world where so many people suffer from nervous breakdowns, where there are so many alcoholics, neurotics and so much unhappiness.

Most Americans in both red and blue states reject and resent the message being sent by Hollywood and some in the media that values are subjective, to be defined by the individual and not by God.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

I think what destroys Hollywood marriages is our work schedule, not so much infidelity.

Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.

Growing up in Hollywood, like I did, I have a passion and a love for the movies, so I go to the cinema all the time.

In Hollywood, there is a lot of pressure to do certain things and getting into drugs, alcohol, or partying a lot is a major one. I stay out of that, because it is a waste of my time. I always remember where I came from and to never change who I am - I stick to my morals, and I do not let anyone pressure me into doing things that I do not want to.

It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.