Quotes About Movies

The earliest movies that I loved were French movies and Italian movies. I grew up watching those kind of movies and often find the truest looks at human nature - you can find them in another countrys movies.

The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.

Listen, I think movies serve many different purposes, from those movies that are frivolous and just an entertainment, to movies that just go to exploring the complexities of the human soul. Everything is valid if it's done with honesty and dignity, and I actually do both of those types of movies in my career.

I try to find inspiration in books, paintings, illustrations and the one thing I try to avoid is just being inspired by other movies, because then you just are talking about movies in movies. I try to talk about movies that are culturally and spiritually a little more diverse.

I think that television lately has been extremely dark and, in some ways, cynical but I also think that people who are writing those shows probably feel exactly as I do - that sometimes the darkness of a story can highlight the light in a story. There's a lot of cynical stuff but I think it may be even more in movies now where you see so many movies about cynical and corrupted characters. That's the state of many movies right now but movies, television, all of culture, there's always going to be a battle between the stories that are cynical and stories that are hopeful.

I want to make all kinds of movies. I do want to make big movies that are a lot of fun to go to, but I also want to make movies that are going to stimulate some thought and maybe raise some awareness.

I've been escaping my whole life. Since I was a little child, I escaped into the movies on the other side as an audience member. I escaped by going into the movies and sitting in the movies all day long.

Because I didn't go to film school, I had a collection of books that were inspiring or taught me how to make movies, shorts with my friends back in Brooklyn, and one of those books was How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime which is Roger's autobiography. After reading that, I realized that oh my God, this guy is behind all my favorite Pam Grier movies. Oh my God, he made the Vincent Price Poe films that ran on television when I was little. He did Grand Theft Auto. He made Death Race 2000.

The idea of going to the movies made Hugo remember something Father had once told him about going to the movies when he was just a boy, when the movies were new. Hugo's father had stepped into a dark room, and on a white screen he had seen a rocket fly right into the eye of the man in the moon. Father said he had never experienced anything like it. It had been like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.

I wanted to do serious movies. I had a certain idea of what good acting was. That's since changed, and I love doing comedies now. I don't like a lot of those movies now, but I thought those were movies that I could do real, serious performances in.

I was always flattered, but I just want my movies to make money. I want to be commercial. I'm never the person who says, "I don't care if people don't see my movies." I always want people to see my movies.

I do really like doing animated movies. I like watching animated movies, and I always have. That's something I didn't let go of, from when I was a kid. It's always exciting for me to get to do that. Animated movies are so rarely bad.

I love movies to death. I spent my entire youth in front of a TV watching old movies and as soon as I was able to get a subway pass when I was 14 I joined the Museum of Modern Art and was there all weekend watching old movies.

I don't even know why, but my entire career is contemporary films. Entire career! There's no period movies - there's one - but there's no period movies, no special effects movies. I just do character studies and so, some of them are gonna bump into each other, but I love the challenge, with a good script. I love the challenge of playing not a very pleasant or attractive character that seduces an audience or wins an audience over by the end.

Personally I like the slow burn; I don't think there is anything wrong with it. When I think about the movies that were most effective on me as a viewer I think of the original Haunting and the Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, the Sixth Sense, the Others. These movies are not over the top at all, they are movies that rely on good story telling, good acting, good premise, good exposition and I want to stay true to that in future projects.

One thing I always heard from the begining when I talked about this being a movie - was that the rule is that animated movies don't work unless they're Disney movies for kids. Unless they're family movies.

Everybody just asks me 'Are you going to make Hollywood movies now?' First, I don't know. Second, I never dreamed about that; I just dreamed about making movies with Tarantino. So if I can make movies with a lot of amazing directors - yes.

The model we established was to give creative people complete creative freedom in exchange for betting on themselves, so they work for the minimums you're allowed to work for, and if the movies work in a big way, everyone does very well. If the movies don't, nobody loses too much money. The benefit to doing all the movies low budget is we can tell different types of stories and take creative risks. The Purge would have been irresponsible to do for $20M, but to do it for $3M makes sense.

I love the art house, and when I say the art house, I don't just mean little, independent movies but movies that really aim to be about something and say something and I love those movies.

The thing about me not doing superhero movies, that's not true at all. Movies are movies. You just go.

Because all the movies that we tell ourselves we can't make - ballets, westerns, dramas, everything that are the hardest things to make - those are the movies that are not only winning awards which is fantastic, but also those movies that are commercial. We won't see a fascinating season like this for a while.

Ultimately the social change has to come from the people who make the movies, so the people who make the movies have to look at the landscape and say to themselves, "Well, you know, these things are changing, and I'm okay with their having changed, and I think it's okay to start reflecting those changes through the movies we make."

I don't want to just make horror movies; I don't want to just make any type of movie - I don't just like horror movies, I love movies.

I grew up really loving horror movies and genre movies. I was a big fan of Universal Monsters movies, read Famous Monsters magazine. I built monster models and creature effects...

And usually the studios they don't want you to have credit for your movies because they want to take credit for the movies because if you get credit for your movies they've got to pay you more.

I also wonder why is it that so many of the movies and books that are detective stories are also the most aesthetically interesting? From Hollywood noirs to horror movies like The Shining [1980].

In the theater, you act more of the time. In the movies, you get to act maybe 20 or 30 minutes of the day. I love acting in movies. It's just different.

Most people are interested in seeing 27-year-old women who are in movies somehow connected to sex. It's interesting to everyone. Especially little movies that are having trouble getting made, there's always sex.

I think movies are expressions of our imagination; they are expressions of our conscious and of our subconscious. I think that movies can be analyzed the way dreams are analyzed, and sometimes I feel that the viewers or the journalists I discuss the film with are psychoanalysts who are trying to make sense of my dreams.

It was a pity that movies and live TV left New York for Hollywood. London theater, movies, television - until (Britain's) money ran out - were always better than ours since the city was the political capital of the country, as well as the artistic and literary one. In L.A. we've always been slightly sealed off from real life. It's no accident that two of our most interesting directors, Woody Allen and Bob Altman, are more or less settled in the real world.

There are conservatives in Hollywood who make good movies. They just don't make conservative movies because that's not what gets funded.

Ive always loved movies since I was a kid. I loved how they could make me happy, sad, or just show me different parts of the world and people. So when I was about six, I decided that that was what I wanted to do: make movies.

It's tough to make a good movie. I think the bigger the movies are, the worse they are. A lot of big movies make a lot of money and you kind of forget about what they are and they don't really make you think.

It's cool that people enjoy my work. That's fun for me that people, like going to my movies and enjoy all the hard work that everyone put into it. I think that's the biggest reward, to know that everyone enjoyed the movies with me.

We need to see men and women as equal partners, but its hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!

It's like everybody is obsessed with Hollywood movies worldwide. And even though everybody hates the Americans, they're still watching American movies.

People always ask me if I hate the nuns. Do I make my movies extra dirty to piss them off? I always say no, that's not the point. To a Catholic, a movie is only dirty if it makes you want to have sex more. If it makes you feel sick, disgusted, ashamed of your own body, then it's not a dirty movie at all. It's a Catholic movie. And I make very Catholic movies.

I like storytelling movies and more than that I like historical movies; and I think someday I'll definitely make a movie about the past 50 years history.

Horror movies, man, the blood entails so much time. And horror movies are not fun; definitely not starting there as a director. Definitely not horror.

I like all of the mental, psychological thriller movies too. I enjoy horror movies across the board.

I've done performances in movies that I was immensely proud of and the movies didn't take off like a rocket at Cape Canaveral, it didn't take off.

I don't want to become more famous than what I am. I'm not interested in being in movies that are going to be shown all around the world and get a massive audience, so I'm interested in doing foreign movies as long as it stays an exceptional case and is exotic, but I don't want to go there [Hollywood].

Typical horror movies of the 1930s were often given a period setting in what looked like a kind of stylized 19th century... the sense of 'elsewhen', of distance, lent to many of these movies by their settings. They exist, as it were, in a 19th century of the mind.

I'm always surprised at what I actually end up doing movies because I don't have a strategy or a game plan, especially now that I'm making my own choices where to act. I love strange things; my favorite movies are weird, eclectic, and intriguing.

They say the movies should be more like life; I think life should be more like the movies.

I prefer sidekick. I tried once for the title of Padawan, but Bubba wigged out saying that mentors are always killed off in books and movies and he’d be damned if he was going to die once he taught me everything I needed to know about killing zombies. (Mark) Then why let you be his sidekick? Isn’t that the same thing? (Nick) Uh, no. In the movies, the sidekicks are the ones who die. (Mark)

3D is quite a lot more advanced in animated movies; for live-action movies we're just taking baby steps, we're just in the beginning.

I think it's dynamite, the way my career has just kept moving, even when people didn't know it did. I made such interesting films, but, yeah, they're not necessarily the big movies that go to the supermarket. I don't need those movies, because I don't wanna do them.