Quotes About Movies

I'm very pessimistic about that, no matter how hard we may try. The Chinese market is huge, but out of last year's $2 billion box office, $1.8 billion was taken in by foreign movies, and just $200 million by our own movies, no matter how much we have learned of their techniques, or their good practices. The Hollywood movies imported into China are all good movies; does the U.S. make lousy movies? Yes, too many lousy movies, but the imports are good films, so how can they not be box office hits? They're all hits.

There are a bunch of different movies I feel that way about. However, there is a debate because as you may know after MST3K ended there have been things like Cinematic Titanic that are the children and the grandchildren of this way of dissecting movies and making fun of them and in a way celebrating the absurdity of those movies as well. There are certain movies that sort of fit into the MST3K paradigm which is hidden gems, these weird horror/sci-fi/fantasy movies.

I love movies; I grew up loving movies. I've always loved movies. I never thought about making movies until I took art classes and then I started studying different artists. As you study paintings, you see light and shadow, of course - Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix. You start to understand the relationship between people and art, and images. For me, between movies that I watched and art, it was like, I'd love to make moving art. Moving pictures.

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.

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.

Even some of us who make movies underestimate their influence abroad. American movies sell American culture. Foreigners want to see American movies. But that's also why so many foreign governments and groups object to them.

If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago.

I want to do movies that mean something, that make people laugh and cry great movies, period-piece movies and work with the best people out there, who bring the best out of me.

I think action movies on the whole have moved more and more into large spectacle, even leaving out super hero movies that seem to me to be more a fantastic science fiction than they are action movies.

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.

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'm not a fan of action movies. I don't watch many action movies, I don't have a lot of references except for 70s action movies or cinema noir.

I was never a critic. I was a journalist and wrote about filmmakers, but I didn't review movies per se. I make that distinction only because I came to it strictly as someone who was just a lover of storytellers and cinematic storytellers. And I still am. I'm still a great movie fan, and I ,that love of movies is very much alive in me. I approach the movies I make as a movie-lover as much as a movie-maker.

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.

Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child. It's now gotten very limited. They only make action movies and hard-core exploitation movies. Women get raped; men get shot.

But strangely, [in] the original Matt Helm books, he's just this super hardass assassin. They sort of made it into a sexy romp for the movies. The books are very, very dark. I also watched 'OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies,' which is a French film. They just made a second one, I think, which is based on like, 100 novels. They're just fantastic. They're set in the '60s. A lot of the visual inspiration definitely came from 1960 James Bond movies and 'OSS 177' and also 'Pink Panther' movies.

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

I think sport in general affects what people see in movies. I always try to explain to people in Hollywood that we have to make movies more like sport because, in sport, everything can happen and it's so much better than movies in some ways.

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...

What I like is horror movies, including '80s slasher movies that politically I have all kinds of problems with. Which is an interesting balance, because I have this leftist puritan strain that, well, if you like something that goes against your politics, maybe you should train yourself not to like it. But I know that I like horror movies and that's what I watch when I get a moment.

The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.

I guess you get pigeon-holed in Hollywood, but I'm ok with that because I've been able to do a lot. I started in the theater, then I went to stand-up comedy, and then when I went into the movies to do comedy and drama and big movies and small movies.

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

If I were to write anything at all, it would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies. In other words, take 'myself,' subtract 'movies,' and the result is 'zero.'

I think real life reflects your movies. In your life, you pick stuff that influences what movie roles you wanna pick. I think if you've got an interesting life, you wanna do interesting movies about interesting things.

Ironically, I think action can be the dullest part of movies nowadays - and I love action movies!

Write comic books if you love comic books so much that you want to write them. Don't write them like movies. Comics can do a lot of things that movies can't do, and vice versa.

People always say to me, "What's wrong with Hollywood? They don't want to make female-driven movies." And that's not where the problem lies. It lies with us, in society. When we make these movies, nobody goes to see them.

Movies these days have made killers into funny people. What's that all about? I've got kids and family and friends, and I don't like bad things. I don't think they're funny, and it's irresponsible to make movies that don't show you how that's not good.

I got a reputation for being sort of nuts and difficult, because I was at that point, so I wasn't much in demand. And also, on the basic level, I'd made a lot of movies that didn't make money. And if you make movies that don't make money - I mean, it is a business, after all - you are not in demand.

My parents took me to that I think is just one of those near-perfect comedies is Young Frankenstein. Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, they're at the height of their game. The two of them working together was amazing. Yeah, just a terrific story. You get emotionally involved. Jokes all the time, jokes that come from story. Like, they don't have to go wildly out of their way to make the jokes. It's a parody of Frankenstein movies, but also it stands as one of the great ones, one of the great Frankenstein movies.

We always have the movies that are more toward real life, but they don't have that much drama or suspense, or we have the full of drama or suspense, but they're far away from real life. Always when I was watching a film, films with good drama, I was thinking, "I wish they were more close to real life." But when I was watching real life films I was thinking, "Well I wish it had more drama." I've tried, in the movies that I worked so far, to get these two things closer and closer to each other.

There are certain ways, narrative forms, that do not function as a continuation, for example, of 3D movies. You see, what is obvious to me is virtual reality or immersive 360 degrees virtual reality is not somehow a part of 3D movies, and it is not a new form of video games, it's neither, it is something completely new, something different, and nobody has come up yet with real convincing content.

A certain type of critic doesn't really want French movies to be visual. They think movies started from books and they forgot this part of moviemaking, like Chaplin and Buster Keaton, which I didn't forget.

Movies serve many purposes, and I've visited many of those genres, from the most light, frivolous comedy that is just trying to make you laugh, to movies that explore the most complicated side of the human soul. As an actor, I play all of those things, and I still like it.

I grew up watching all these crazy movies, European movies and stuff, and I guess that I always laughed at things that were a little more offbeat.

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.

I love movies to death. I spent my entire youth in front of a TV watching old movies.

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 don't like to watch my own movies - I fall asleep in my own movies.

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.

For movies to get greenlit solely based on the success of other movies that have a lot of women in them? It's so ridiculous to me.

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

The thing that's nice about working with Adam [Sandler] is that there's sort of a family vibe, cause people who have worked on his movies have worked on many of his movies, so along with the kids and the cast, all the people that worked on the movie, it was like a family and every day we'd make each other laugh.

Yeah, this is what I think was a quality of movies, is you're in a group of people. You're sharing something with people. Whether those other people make you laugh more, you're all laughing. You're all happy together. There's something... manmade about that in a way that's - I'm not sure how that manifests itself in nature, but culturally we've set that up when we invented theater and the movies and all that stuff.

There's a thing with genre movies and science fiction movies that number two is the charmed; two seems to be the best. I loved 'Terminator 2.'

I loved old movies as a kid, so I always watched old movies.

My movies are not movies of answers but of questions.