Quotes About Movies

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.

Danny Boyle has been a huge, has had a huge effect on me. His movies, early movies like Trainspotting and those movies. So I've always loved the energies of those movies. But also, that they are very focused on the characters. Cause it's not only gimmickery, it's not only about visuals. You feel a real need, a love for the main characters. So that's what I've always loved about watching movies myself.

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like.

Because I didn't go to film school, I had a collection of books that were inspiring or taught me how to make movies, shorts with my friends back in Brooklyn, and one of those books was How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime which is Roger's autobiography. After reading that, I realized that oh my God, this guy is behind all my favorite Pam Grier movies. Oh my God, he made the Vincent Price Poe films that ran on television when I was little. He did Grand Theft Auto. He made Death Race 2000.

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 live in New York City, and I'm making huge action movies. The people that make huge action movies live in L.A., and they're surrounded by other people who make huge action movies. I'm surrounded by people making documentaries!

I make the joke, all the time, that if you have the word "man" and a number in the title, like Batman 2, Spider-Man 2 or Iron Man 12, you'll get it made. The kind of movies I make, studios don't make them. I've made a lot of movies, and at Castle Rock, we've made 125 movies. None of them get made at a studio. I've got to scrounge around for money, every time. I just like to tell stories. I'm a storyteller, so I want the most people to see it.

I made a body of work, which was like trying to make movies on a wall and was made up of all different images and materials. I had the aspiration to make movies because I thought that was the cycle. I had this insane egomaniac idea that I could make movies because I made these gigantic art projects.

Sure, I watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Maybe I've seen more Hollywood movies than French movies

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.

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.

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.

Thank God for small movies and filmmakers who can make movies for not $8 million. Thank God for $8,000 movies.

Even from a really young age I was a huge movie buff - five, six, seven, eight. Just loved movies, but in a more in-depth way than most kids that loved movies at that time. I'd find a filmmaker or something and want to see all his movies.

I love Hitchcock movies. I took a Hitchcock class in college, so I saw all his movies. I wrote papers on his movies.

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 want people to see my movies. My talent, my sensibilities are what people want to see in the movies... While I have the talent to make the kind of movies people want to see I want to continue to do that, keep making big pictures and make what I love. I’m really just making the films I want to see. There’s not a strategy.

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.

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.

I think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.

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

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

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

I don't make movies about issues. This is my same litmus test for all the movies I love: Is it a great character on a great emotional quest with a great emotional need? Do they overcome great emotional obstacles? Is it a fantastic story? I didn't set out to be a political activist. I'm just a human being who's moved by certain things, and if certain things break my heart, I set out to fix them.

The movies had a slogan at the time, to distinguish themselves from TV, that said 'movies are better than ever.'

I don't see that many movies where people are depicting middle-class suburban life in a more textured way. My feelings about the suburbs are not so wonderful, so my movies tend to be a little melancholy.

I have a nineteen-month old daughter. I totally don't mind devoting time to her. When you have a kid, it's hard to go out to the movies. I really don't know what's going on with comic book movies.

A lot of the things I was doing on YouTube nobody was doing at the time, and now everybody is doing them, and I think making movies - I know a few Youtubers have done it, and hopefully this movie does well and more YouTubers want to take a risk and make movies, and I'm excited about it.

In the theater, you act more of the time. In the movies, you get to act maybe 20 or 30 minutes of the day. I love acting in movies. It's just different.

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.

I just feel like there's so many movies I haven't seen that I want to see, that I would never go back to the same one. It's funny because all my friends, they have movies that they've seen over and over again.

I guess to the outside observer, all my movies look like musty old black-and-white artifacts, but my earlier movies had been more static and tableaux-ish.

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.

In growing up, I was a child of the movies. I went to the movies every given opportunity, and that's pretty much what has informed a lot of my choices.

Notice how every science fiction movie or television show starts with a shot of the location where the story is about to occur. Movies that take place in outer space always start with a shot of stars and a starship. Movies that take place on another world always start with a shot of that planet. This is to let you know where you are. Novels and stories start the same way. You have to give the reader a sense of where he is and what's happening as quickly as possible. You don't want to start the story by confusing the reader.

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.

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.

Actually, the few good Chinese movies that foreign countries choose to import are Zhang Yimou's, and mine, a few directors, but how many movies can we make in a year? We can only make a few, while they turn them out continuously.

I guess what I like in my movies is where you see a character change by maybe two degrees as opposed to the traditional movie change of ninety degrees. I guess that always feels false to me in movies because that doesn't truly happen. Around me, at least in the life I live, I guess I don't see people change ninety or a hundred degrees. I see them change in very small increments. I think it's just a monitor I might have on myself as a writer to not make any false scenes.

The cinema camera doesn't make movies; it allows movies to be made. It's the creative people who make it real to people.

I was that kind of kid that was going to the movies every weekend, I couldnt get enough of the movies, and now I get to make them. So I kind of have a one-track mind.

In the past that you should choose a list of female action superhero movies that haven't worked. I don't believe they haven't worked because they had a female in the lead, I believe they didn't work because they weren't good. They weren't technically well done movies.

I like the idea of sitting in a theater with a bunch of people. With technology now, people are getting more and more isolated. I like the community coming around the story. You don't have that with a DVD. People go home, they're tired from work, they can turn it off. It doesn't make you commit the same way, if you can control the movie. More difficult movies, it's too easy to turn them off. All the time, I see movies I know if I had seen it on DVD, I wouldn't have hung with it. If you see it on the screen, you hang with it and it pays off better than a movie you can easily sit through on DVD.

As a kid, a little kid I loved going to the movies, and now I love making movies.

An awful lot of good movies have gone unrecognized, and an awful lot of bad movies have had tremendous recognition. As long as you keep that in mind, you are never really disappointed.

I grew up watching monster movies and horror movies, which I felt were like fairy tales and I think this always spoke to me. Something about that is symbolism - the beauty and the magic which helps me work with film and start making modern fairy tales.

I like movies that instill passion in the viewer. I like movies that can teach us about who we are as people.