Quotes About Movies

I've had movies bomb with terrible reviews, I've had movies make a lot of money with terrible reviews, I've had movies get good reviews and make money. And I like it best when the movies do well and the reviewers like them.

Nowadays the movies that people are going to see in the theaters are the big-event movies, like Spider-Man or something, or they're 25-year-old models who are vampires, or they're very broad comedies, or they're standard action movies. So if you're going to work for a studio and do a movie for the budget that the movie needs, those are the kinds of movies you'll be in.

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.

Movies have kind of become a tad bit uninspired, in that the big studio movies are spending more money to chase the big money with all these franchises and superhero movies. Some of them have been great, but some of them are a little tiresome.

I grew up looking at... going to the movies a lot, as much as they'd let you. I grew up in Manchester in the north of England in the '40s and '50s. I saw a lot of movies. They were all Hollywood and British movies. I didn't see a film that wasn't in English until I was 17 when I went to London to be a student.

Look, I've done some low-budget movies and I've done some big-budget movies, and the big-budget movies were always kind of disorganized.

The '80s just had this sense of outrageous fun coupled with great stories and characters. Then there's the practical effects and buckets of gore in movies. These are movies that, for the most part, still stand up to this day. But I guess the real reason for my love and obsession with this period is these were my first horror movies. I was a teenager during the '80s and I think spending that part of your life in that particular time really has an impact on you for the rest of your life.

When you make movies, I find that I never have time to go to the movies and enjoy movies like I used to, because I'm so movied out, right, I'm so filmed out that the last thing that I wanna do is with the little spare time that I have is stick in a dark room and watch more stuff on the screen.

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.

If you deconstruct the movies that have done well, Pixar-type movies that do incredibly well and make hundreds of millions of dollars, they have a strain of decency and conservatism that maybe even their filmmakers don't even recognize. Yet, we cross our fingers that by mistake, liberal filmmakers and liberal producers are going to by mistake make conservative movies. We have to become invested in it, or else we have no excuse to complain.

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

Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you'd write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business.

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].

Movies are not the book. Movies are not even the screenplay. They are the movie.

All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.

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.

I always wish the hotels were like they are in movies and TV shows, where if you're in Paris, right outside your window is the Eiffel Tower. In Egypt, the pyramids are right there. In the movies, every hotel has a monument right outside your window. My hotel rooms overlook the garbage dumpster in the back alley.

You have formal rehearsal, a lot of things you don't have in movies - which is, you have to formally rehearse. You have to know your back story, discuss it, and almost everybody onstage has to know each other's [story], so that when it comes time to actually do it, you can throw it all away. That's the way I like to - and I didn't realize until very recently - that's the way I like to prepare for movies.

A movie is better than real life because in the movies only the bad guys die. Or you can pick the good movies where the bad guys die and only those. If you get tricked and a good person dies in the movie then you can rewrite it in your head so the good person lives and the part about death is superfluous.

I don't know if the '80s were unique, but we certainly got original, groundbreaking stuff at the time with movies like 'Back to the Future' and 'Star Wars' - movies that became classics.

My father is so in love with making movies, and he'sso charismatic about it, that it's hard to be around him withoutwanting to 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.

In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.

The-one of the odd things that's going on with smoking these days is that in the '90s, smoking at movies in the '90s, there were more movies showing smoking than there were in the '60s.

I am a fan of movies and there is something about watching film that is burned into celluloid for all time that is now a piece of history. You go watch, being a fan of classic films and my children and their children are going to be watching these movies.

In my own country, many of the movies in recent years express our innate fears about what awaits us. They are apocalyptic visions that leave only a few people on earth-whole cities surviving under domes because we have depleted our natural resources. And often in these movies, for reasons that I question, we have space aliens who are always blowing up Washington, D.C., and the White House.

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.

I love these kind of movies as a kind of cinema-going geek myself. Those characters, you want to be like those characters when you go to the movies. You know, when you see a movie with a guy who's really cool and the killing's slick and easy. I don't know. There's something intoxicating about it.

I used to just daydream all the time about being in movies, from the age of like, four onwards. I would sit down and watch movies with my father and my grandfather, and always pretended that I was in the stories.

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

I often envy a filmmaker or a playwright or an author where people are like, "Yeah, I sat down every night and read your book and it was beautiful." Or, "Yeah, I went to the movies and all I did was watch the movie because that's all you could do at the movies." Where with music, it's like, "Ugh, I love your music. I listen to it while I'm jogging thinking about how I hate my body." But it is also the privilege of being a musician is you can have your music in this documented form and play it live and that's, I think, what draws me to it the most.

I'm at a point in my life where I could make 20 more movies, but I want to make 20 more movies that matter to me.

If you were buying products or going to movies based upon the politics of the people involved, well I probably couldn't go to half the movies I go to.

You go to movies to see people you love suffer - that's why you go to the movies. You don't go to see a movie about a guy who already knows he has a wonderful life.

I think the mistake people make with horror movies and what makes them successful is a lot of horror movies get made by people who don't really like them, so they don't respect them. And when you like horror and have admiration for it, that community knows that what's important for a horror movie is important for every other kind of movie.

I love the Elvis movies. I used to watch them. In every single one of his movies he wasn't acting as a car salesman - he was acting as a car salesman who loved to play guitar.

Everybody who's making the movies needs to work hard to make sure they're good. And if you don't show up and see the movies and support them financially, no one is going to make them. It's going to change unless it makes money. That's the long and short of it. You have to give in to the fact that it's a business.

You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.

I feel very protected when I see a movie. That's why I like making violent movies or radical movies.

I look at the Christian Bale movies, the Batman films, and that shows you that superhero movies don't just have to be about men in tights.

The most difficult thing has definitely been movies. From a comedian's standpoint, you think being real big is the best thing, but with movies, the screen is huge, you're big anyway! Also, coming from a TV personality - MTV was all about high energy and selling the hottest video - I had to learn to [take it down]. A lot of characters I'm playing are not necessarily that kind of guy.

I'm very careful of not being critical of other people's movies, which work in different styles. I think some of my movies can be interpreted as critical of their subjects.

After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best movies in the world.

The truth is, I've made about 30 movies in 30 years, and I've been criticized for 30 years for not making more movies.

Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.

I just love movies, so suddenly, you’re political about movies, and that’s dark. It’s just not fun when something you love becomes calculated.

What I like about the '60s movies was that they were about women. They were telling women's stories. I think a lot of movies don't tell women's stories anymore.