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.

Pretty early on in making the first movie I realized that this is what I wanted to do. I felt like by that time I just found my niche, like this is what I was supposed to be doing. So I completely submerged myself into the world of watching movies, making my own movies, buying video cameras and lights. When I wasn't making a movie, I was making my own movies. When I wasn't making movies, I was watching movies. I was going back and studying film and looking back at guys that were perceived as great guys that I can identify with. It just became my life.

I think its important for movies to recognize that they are part of a history of movies. I also think that most movies are about movies anyway, even if they're about something else.

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 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 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 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.

The Seydoux-Schlumberger industrial empire won't make $100 million movies. Hollywood does that much better. But you don't make movies because of their budgets, you make movies because you believe in them. Setting limits doesn't matter to me.

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.

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.

I feel like there's a randomness in real life that too many Hollywood movies just shave off. It feels too intentional, and life just isn't that intentional. I like popcorn movies. I like entertaining movies. But, I feel like I could do something more in the real world.

When I was a kid I was a big fan of the Universal Monsters movies of the 1930's and the 1940's. I loved movies like The Wolfman (1941) and Dracula (1931). I really wanted to be in those movies. Eventually I started nagging my parents about it, and it turned from, "I wanna be in a monster movie! I wanna be in a monster movie!" to "I just wanna be in a movie." So I think my parents just thought that if they took me to one audition I'd see how boring it was and I wouldn't wanna do it. But I ended up getting the part, and I got a bunch of roles after that as well.

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.'

The rise of video on demand will make it possible for small movies to earn back costs via $9.95 24-hour rentals and for people in cities without independent cinemas to see the kind of movies they never have before. That's great - but on the other hand, that's TV.

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

I don't like gratuitous violence. I don't like the 'Saw' movies. I don't like the 'Hostel' movies. I don't like anything that is violence for violence's sake.

I do enjoy animated movies. I really love anime and movies like 'Spirited Away' and 'Howl's Moving Castle.'

Movies are movement. A comic-book is immobility. From one still picture to another, but no movement. You need to make the movement in your head. In the movies, you see the movement. It's different. What is the same is the mind of the creator.

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.

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.

One of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.

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.

We're living in a time where movies are very unimportant. They're not leaving a footprint on your heart. We're going to the movies now and we're going, "Oh, man, that was cool! That was thrilling! That was a ride!" But, we're not walking away anymore thinking, "I just experienced something that could change the way I live."

I love film and I love sitcoms, and I was one of those kids that would just go to the movies on the weekend and spend my whole weekend watching all of the movies.

All those years I had been making movies because I loved movies, and that's what made all the difference. If you're doing it because you love it you can succeed because you'll work harder than anyone else around you, take on challenges no one else would dare take, and come up with methods no one else would discover, especially when their prime drive is fame and fortune. All that will follow later if you really love what you do. Because your work will speak itself.

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.

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)

My movies are not movies of answers but of questions.

They allow us to disrespect our Black woman. A lot of these things would be considered criminal if it were to be carried out in the streets. That's like when they tell you after you buy your VHS and you rent movies they tell you not to copy the movies.

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.

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.

I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.

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.

You're a superhero. Shut up and enjoy having superpowers. This makes me crazy. This is why the Marvel movies kick DC movies' asses right and left. Because, I'm not paying $15 for a movie to go watch people being morose about lives that are much more interesting and exciting than mine and they hate them. I'm paying my money to see people sort of revel in doing things that I can't do.

They're innocent movies, and they're fun movies and there were no pretensions about 'em.

I watched horror movies way too young and one of my favorite horror movies was The Shining. Jack Nicholson's character in that just bore a hole in my brain, his weird, maniacal controlled stuff. Obviously Mara in Village of the Damned wasn't an alcoholic and didn't have emotional, crazy outbursts. She was very non-emotional. But it was that sort of evil that I was tapping into.

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.

Did you know that Nuremberg courtroom was designed so that the Allies could project movies during the trial? And, also so that they could film the trial? The first movies that were shown were prepared by John Ford - a compilation of material from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. But here comes an interesting part. Did you know they lit (using fluorescent tubes) the defendants so they could be filmed watching the films that were shown during the trial?

We need to take a step back and realize that what happened in the 1950s, when he started his career, is exactly where we are today. Everything goes in a cycle, and right now, distribution is changing. Audiences might be kind of sick of these giant blockbuster movies with all these special effects where blue people are running around and the hero is some non-human entity. These are all great movies, but I think that there's definitely room for new voices to come out.

I was a barfly, so going to work and acting and rehearsing and then going and sitting in a bar and drinking and then going home was sort of my lifestyle. And there was none of that out here in the '70s when I was lucky enough to get movies, and nobody else that I knew was working in movies at that point. I didn't really have a lot of movie friends.

You don't make movies to win awards. You make movies because you want people to see them.

I just trust the people involved. Marvel and DC for the last 16 years - is that 90 percent of the time it's incredible top talent. Like, this is what makes it different from the pre-2000 superhero movies. I would say, except Tim Burton and Richard Donner, it was generally, comic book movies were done by guys who weren't that into the material and people who didn't really respect the stuff. But as everything, whether it's Wolverine, X-Men, Avengers, Batman, all these things, it's just been done by top-tier people. I have total confidence that they'll continue that tradition of being great.

I'd rather do movies 'cause I am better at movies, but I do shows 'cause the opportunities have come forward.

Internationally and in foreign markets, movies starring women don't make as much money as movies starring men. And then you can blame filmmakers, especially in comedy, which is my bread and butter, because it's become a bit of a boys' club over the years. With the boys in charge you get these takes on women which are either the girlfriend or the mean wife or the girl who appears in a romantic comedy. You're just getting either men's fantasies about women or what they think is the reality about women instead of men just having a healthy attitude about women.

Some of my favorite movies are Hollywood movies. Hollywood is part of the cinematic spectrum. I nurture a healthy love-hate relationship with Hollywood.