Quotes About Movies

Richard Donner made great movies. Seminal movies. The Academy, though, and we have to be careful here, should recognize popular films. Popular films are what make it all work. There was a time when popular movies were commercial movies, and they were good movies, and they had to be good movies. There was no segregation between good independent films and popular movies.

Yeah, when you work with somebody that famous everybody wants to know what are they like or - but I know some of the movies that I know because they're more like NOBODY'S FOOL or like that, because I don't really watch the big R movies, I haven't really seen them so much. I loved him [Bruce Willis] from his TV show and some of the smaller movies he's done. The bigger movies I start to space out in, like, there just so, I don't really watch those kind of movies so much.

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.

Mainstream Hollywood makes a few good movies a year. And in order to be in one of those, you have to be one of five people. Hollywood makes many bad movies too, which I'm not interested in being a part of. But there are only a few good independent movies a year, and many, many bad ones. I want to be in good movies, and I want people to see them.

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.

There are movies that require fantasy and slightly more fantastical acting. Lines that are good for certain movies, in real life circumstances, would be absolutely unbelievable things to really say, and you would look at these people like they're freaks for conversing that way. But somehow for certain styles of movies, it works, and it seems fine.

When [Len Wiseman and I] first met, I was a huge fan of the 'Alien' movies. I was a huge 'Die Hard' fan until it ate my husband for two years. We sit and watch movies all the time. One of my favorite movies is 'Dog's Day Afternoon.' Len loves that movie.

I came out of film school and went after movies that I thought audiences wanted to see or that the studios wanted, as opposed to the movies that I wanted. Over the last 10 years, I've gravitated more and more toward the films that I grew up loving - classic Spielberg, Lucas, James Cameron and Ridley Scott movies.

Our Pavlovian response to movies has gotten to its lowest point ever. You look at a lot of movies that are successful and a lot of movies that studios hold up as examples and you go, 'My God, that isn't even a story. It isn't even two acts. It's eight set pieces drawn out with slow motion.' The difficulty for me was that you had to hope that people were interested in this kind of a story.

People follow my movies for a reason, and that's because I believe in them, and I don't want to just make movies for the sake of making movies.

If you think about TV series, we make 16 one-hour movies a season. You don't get any opportunity like that in movies. I mean, I can't say I'll be able to do 16 movies in the next year, and so that's how I see it.

All over the world there are a lot of distributors that have the equipment for 3D but they don't have the movies really. The only source of 3D movies is Hollywood. Only Hollywood sends the 3D movies. So it was an option.

Movies I liked growing up were like Francis Ford Coppolla movies and Scorsese movies.

We've grown up with American movies. Not to say that American movies - or movies that have been based in Watts, Compton, or Inglewood - are a 100% true depiction of that world. But also you have inner-city London, and the foundations are pretty much the same. Especially me, growing up in Southeast London, in Peckham.

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.

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].

I like films, I like movies, I like playing different characters and working with different actors, and filming in different places. I like movies, because it's kind of a combination of every art, it's like it's picture, it's story, it's music, it's kind of like a clash and a collide of every art. It's really neat.

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

I've ended up as a filmmaker who really loves the movie part of movies. That time in my life was a big influence on the kind of movies that I ended up making. I always think I'm going to make a movie that's gritty and real, but then I make a movie that's like an opera. I fight it at first and then that's just the way it is.

These so called Popcorn movies, or family movies, actually provide something quite beautiful and something quite necessary, which is a family bonding experience.

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.

I got my shot at the movies. I love doing standup live. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wanted to try movies, so I gave it a shot. I had two shots and I didn't really do it. That wasn't really happening for me. On the second movie I got to meet the girl that would be my wife. So I got to hang out with her and get engaged, and get the whole wedding thing. It was really great.

There's always been violence in movies, and there will always be violence in movies. Whether it lends to the one psychotic that's out there, thinking the worst thoughts you could possibly thing, is always going to be a mystery.

I haven't done a lot of studio movies, but studio movies and independent films are always just as fun as each other.

I don't believe in making movies to cater to a foreign audience. You never know what the reaction is going to be anyhow. At the time I made Maborosi, the Japanese movies getting any foreign attention were all period dramas and seemed to be about some representative element of Japanese life, and my movie was contemporary movie about one specific woman trying to understand her husband's suicide.

Good genre movies are a little bit like trying to write a haiku. There are certain things that you have to do to fulfill the audience's expectations, but inside that, you have complete freedom to talk about whatever you want. Who wants to see a movie about gun violence in America and class? But, if you set it in this terrifying, fun, roller coaster ride of a movie, you can talk about whatever you want. That's been the game that genre movies play, when they do it well.

All I knew is that I loved movies and comedy and TV, and I wanted to perform. I made a bunch of shorts and movies in college, and that was always fun too. I directed some plays in college. It was taking it all in and trying to immerse myself in as much of it as possible.

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.

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.

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'll say, what makes me happy about making movies is, every once in a while through movies we find a kind of honesty. There's an honesty in fiction that's as effective or even more powerful than the honesty of our lives. We can find something that's genuinely true, like a chemistry between people or a statement that speaks to an audience.

Hopefully we'll get to a point where there are absolutely no restrictions on any kind of violence in movies. I'd love to see us get to a point where you can go to theaters and see movies unrated and that people know its not real violence. It's all pretend. It's all fake. It's just acting. It's just magic tricks.

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

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 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 love superheroes and I love weird horror films... I could definitely feel that there was a lack of movies like The Martian being made: smart genre movies that can appeal to adults.

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.

Back 20 years ago, there was a division between movie actors and TV actors. That's kind of gone away. People who have had a lot of success in movies in the past now want to be on TV. There used to be much more of a quality division between TV and movies, and that's kind of not the case anymore.

Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies.

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 made a few movies in Holland for a lot of TV series. I came to Los Angeles and for the last 10 years, I made a lot of feature films - all kinds of low budget action movies for the studios.

In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies.

Actually, I went from doing a lot of movies early on in my career, then to doing TV, and I don't know whether we'll get back to some movies or not.

Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting.

There have been 14 versions that I can find of Burke & Hare movies. They have all been horror films and all the movies have taken place in Victorian times, which doesn't make any sense.

What is so liberating about this whole business is when you see that, you know, big movies are going to come out, huge movies are going to come out, and then you see them up in Malibu in the little Triplex theater a week later, on the scratch negative, and you think...“This is show business. This is the great movie career. And it’s all finding it in the shoebox.”