Quotes About Movies

I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.

I remember seeing Airplane, and even Mel Brooks movies like History of the World Part I, and just really loving that style of movies that make fun of movies. I think it needs to be done. All of these movies are ripe for being poked at.

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.

I don't find movies interesting. I just want to do the movies that made me interested in getting into movies, and they're few and far between.

I wanted to do different movies. I wanted to do deeper movies. More human movies based on human feelings.

I've been making movies for a long time. The Japanese way of making movies has become second nature to me. To get away from that, I really try to surround myself with younger staff and approach making movies not like a veteran of the industry but always as a beginner and a rookie.

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'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.

Cinema Paradiso, because it reminds me of why I make movies, the magic of movies, the romance of movies.

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.

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.

I don't like my movies. I prefer John Ford's movies. I've made some movies that are interesting, or that have some point, or are more or less beautiful. But I've never made anything big to me, from my point of view. "Big" like John Ford or someone of that kind. I say John Ford because he is my favorite director.

I like movies. Movies have afforded me a modicum of luxuries. The thing about the movies is, if you're bad in a movie, you're bad forever.

If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way. I don't look at American History X as a failure, or Fight Club as a failure, or 25th Hour as a failure, or Larry Flynt as a failure, or any of the movies that I care about that I've made that were not immediately successful. I'll stand with those movies any day over 90 percent of the movies that came out at the same time that made a hundred million dollars

I don't like movies that are too manipulative. A lot of movies thrive on really pushing your buttons and making you hate the villain.

From a young age, [James Baldwin] was watching all those different films. He's watching John Wayne killing off the Indians. He came to the point that the Indians were him. You had to educate yourself because the movies were not educating you. The movies were giving you a reflection of you that was not the truth. That's the trick. The movie was also giving a reflection of what the country is. Basically, a country that wanted itself to be innocent. That's the ambivalence of Hollywood.

Now the time comes that I decided I only will do art films, basically. In a way, very similar to Isabella Rossellini. I prefer to work only with people like Lars von Trier or Guy Maddin or Gus Van Sant, just to name a few. But also there's bills to pay, and sometimes you have to make a movie. So my decision from now on is art movies, or movies which are commercial, but for real money. That is my decision.

For movies, I usually do an entire book that has all kinds of things about what is happening at the time the movie is going on and try to get into what my character's going to be like, to try to get some consistency, because they shoot movies out of order.

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.

Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.

[David Milch] had say, "You have to understand that our history of western movies, what we've been doing in westerns since the movies began to talk, you had audiences that would be offended by certain things, and there was a cleaning-up of the way people spoke."

I love pre-code movies. Some of my favorites are movies with Warren William and there is an MGM film called "Skyscraper Souls" which is the best Warner Brothers movie that MGM ever made.

I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay.

I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

When you're dealing with TV and with movies, people dont take it as serious as they do with music. If a rapper does a song about shooting people on the block, and goes into a restaurant or grocery store, people grab their purses because they're afraid the person is violent. With TV and movies, people know it's okay, it's just a script.

The studios are never going to make $200 million a picture with those types of movies. It's not familiar to them, and it's not a model that can necessarily be sustained. Now, if they go back to making movies about people ... well, I hope they do that.

I always knew I wanted to be a character in the movies. When I was growing up, I had to have a lot of surgery, and I spent a lot of time recovering at home and in the hospital. Watching movies took me away from my own problems and gave me a total escape.

I don't think you retire from movies; movies retire you.

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

The Jackass movies are honestly some of the best movies I've ever seen. I laugh so hard at them. Those guys are geniuses. If they had grown up with a different group of people, they could've been performance artists at Bard College, and people would be writing papers about them.

People who are afraid to go to horror movies are generally afraid their whole lives. People say to me, 'Do you have nightmares?' I never have nightmares! And I go to movies and see the most bizarre things in the world, and go... Wow that is really sick, how fun is that! And I don't have to carry it around. I think that's very healthy.

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.

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 want to try and work in different genres with different types of actors, on small movies and big movies.

Well, I don't know. When I signed my contract, I signed to play Loki in five more Marvel movies, but they were unspecified. So, if there will be more movies or not remains to be seen, but I like the idea of Loki turning up in the shadows when people least expect him, but you never know these things, the world changes and the things change, but I feel like I know who Loki is, so I wouldn't mind.

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.

We don't do movies for the industry. We do movies for the fans, for the people. If the industry give you a trophy or not, or pat you on the back or not, it's nice, but it's not something you should dwell on.

I don't have a passion for TV or movies or acting. I have a passion for wrestling and I find it hard to leave that for TV and movies. But if it is a thing that is a short amount of time I would consider it, but wrestling is what I love to do!

You can shave your head, but I've had to gain a lot of weight for movies, I've had to drop weight really fast for movies. I've had to learn accents or embody physical behaviors or twitches and things like that. And sometimes you take to some things easily and sometimes [not]. That's the challenge of the job.

Singin' in the Rain was most excellent if you like movies where people burst into song and tap-dance. Which I do, though not as much as I like movies where people don't.

Some of my favorite movies are action movies. You want something good to say. That comes from good writing. But writing is not a skill I possess, unfortunately.

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 like to make movies the way people made movies in the '70s, where they lived and died with these stories, and cared about them, and went to war for them, and they all said something they wanted to say.

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.

I don't really like movies that are all one or the other. It's really about the play between both of them. Now that I've said that, there's actually lots of movies that I like that are one or the other but it's just not for me as a filmmaker.

I've made 30 movies and for the most part my movies work. In a business where success is an exception and not the rule, I've mostly been successful.

I learned early Jack Kirby favorite movies were the Warner Brothers from the '30s. When you look at Jack Kirby's comic books, or at least when I do, I can make an instant connection. When he said he loved those movies it was like, "Of course."