Quotes About Movies

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.

Nowadays the movies that people are going to see in the theaters are the big-event movies, like Spider-Man or something, or they're 25-year-old models who are vampires, or they're very broad comedies, or they're standard action movies. So if you're going to work for a studio and do a movie for the budget that the movie needs, those are the kinds of movies you'll be in.

Oddly enough, most of the books written about the subject aren't very good because they just focus on the more hateful movies that they did very early, early on when they were trying to, you know, get Germany into the war, whether it be anti-Semitic movies like "Jud Suss," or "The Eternal Jew," or movies made against the Polish to help, you know, create sympathy for them to invade Poland. You know, there'd be movies where there would be some German girl living in Poland who's raped by the Polish or something.

I've always been passionate about these different (film) genres. Kung fu movies, samurai movies, Japanese movies, all this kind of stuff, and my love for it, and just trying to present it in a way that other people can love it as much as I do.

I would say the film world has stopped operating as one. We have divided it into Hindi movies, Bengali movies, Tamil movies and so on. Earlier, there was only one channel and we all knew what was going on. Today, it is hard to keep track of programmes due to the advent of regional channels.

It's too expensive, that's the thing nobody wants to talk about. It is too expensive to make movies. That's not true, it is too expensive to market movies. Making movies is not.

Personally I like the slow burn; I don't think there is anything wrong with it. When I think about the movies that were most effective on me as a viewer I think of the original Haunting and the Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, the Sixth Sense, the Others. These movies are not over the top at all, they are movies that rely on good story telling, good acting, good premise, good exposition and I want to stay true to that in future projects.

I love movies and I love to watch movies and being a part of the whole film experience. Being a filmgoer is a unique experience, and it can affect you on so many levels. But being an actor in movies you often have a very narrow palette for expressing yourself.

In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.

The long and short of it is that I am now in a position in England to green light movies, and that's really excellent - not high-budget movies, but movies none the less.

A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club's a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn't look at Panic Room and think, "Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire". These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They're not particularly important.

Why do I continue making movies? Making movies is better than cleaning toilets.

I test the movies a lot, and if the audience says they love the movie, we know we're on the right track. And if they tell me they hate it, I try to figure out what I've done wrong. But every time out, the audience wants me to go deeper, they want to know more about the characters, and they don't want these movies to be shallow. So they really urge me to tell them a complicated story, and then when I do so, they're thrilled

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.

I never said that movies were struggling behind TV. I'm just saying that movies have a better creative cache.

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.

Maybe you know it but it's not so easy to finance movies in total. And the reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government.

Ever since 'Lassie' and 'Old Yeller', I won't watch animal movies. Animals in movies always die.

People always ask why I don't make independent movies. I do make independent movies - I just make them at Sony and Paramount.

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

It's more important you learn what to make movies about than how to make movies

We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands.

I always wanted to live in L.A. The other thing that always inspired me was movies; that's why I'm here. I always wanted to be a part of the movie business and make movies. That's why I went to AFI grad school for filmmaking.

I am a fan of movies and there is something about watching film that is burned into celluloid for all time that is now a piece of history. You go watch, being a fan of classic films and my children and their children are going to be watching these movies.

I'm not making every decision due to my children. But I do hope they never see some movies I'm doing. But I do want to do more family-friendly movies.

I've made quite a number of movies that I've never even seen and I've made some movies that I thought were good that nobody saw... Sometimes they end up on television.

I'm not a cinematic cinematic person. I go to the movies like I did back when I was a kid. I go to the movies and I sit down. If the music works, hmm. If it doesn't work, hmm. The whole concept of the thing, not as one piece here or there. For me, music is a large part.

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

I was born in Paris in the mid-1960s, and by the time I was 12 I had started going to the movies by myself. Most of the movies of that period never appealed to me. I didn't like the 'naturalism,' the sad or the 'down-to-earth' characters. What I wanted from film was fantasy, dreams, funny situations, extravagant decor - and beautiful women.

Every year I hear people complain that the quality of screenplays and movies is declining. In my opinion, the vast majority of scripts written - as well as most movies that are released - are not very original, well-written, or interesting. It has always been that way, and I think it always will be.

As far as writing, I like watching bad movies. Nothing stops me in my tracks more than watching a great film like 'The Godfather' or 'Dog Day Afternoon' or 'The Graduate.' You watch one of those, and you never want to write again. Whereas with bad movies, it makes you think, If that counts, I certainly could write.

I don't really have any great interest in writing for movies. Comics, to me, is a much more promising field. There's still a lot of ground to be broken in comics, whereas movies, to a degree... I don't know. They're a wonderful art form, but they're not my favorite art form. They might not even be in the top five of my favorite art forms.

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.

If military movies were automatically successful we'd make nothing but military movies. But seriously, patriotism is one thing that all Americans have in common.

Producers and studios want to make movies that are more appealing internationally and I think that you have to use your different cultures as an advantage to be able to make those movies.

I'm very careful of not being critical of other people's movies, which work in different styles. I think some of my movies can be interpreted as critical of their subjects.

All movies are different, all movies have their own life.

Horror movies travel pretty well anyway. They're like action movies: People overseas can watch them and enjoy them, and they're not so culturally specific in terms of their references, and they can follow a good scary story.

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.

After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best movies in the world.

Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.

I was making Marvel Studios movies, Amy Pascal was running Sony. Occasionally, she would share drafts with certain people at the studio and I would read them, and see cuts of the movies. But what I've learned with is that I'm no help whatsoever giving passive comments on other people's projects.

If I make two movies my entire life, and they're two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don't need to be Steven Spielberg.

I am a huge fan of Bollywood movies. Whenever I get time, I enjoy watching Hindi movies. Cooking really interests me, so I also experiment with food in my free time.

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.

All my favorite movies are American movies since I was a kid.

Certainly the movies were always in the air for me. I come from the era when actors thought it was a big deal to be in the movies.

What you really need to build a character is exactly what you don't have in the movies - time. You know, movies are like a line drawing. You have to make very quick decisions, which are, in the end instinctive. Or you make a decision to say "Well, maybe I can do that, because... Oh, that could be irritating after a while, or distracting, etc. etc." Some of it is a matter of time, always.