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.

Studio movies are looking more like independent movies and independent movies are looking more like studio movies, and I think cinema is better now because of it.

All of my movies are about how I wish the world would work. I've made very few movies about how the world worked. I could name them on one and a half hands, about how my movies have been very reflective of how the world was exactly. A lot of my movies are really about the way I wish the world was, and that's what this whole art form is all about. It's an interpretive art form.

I think one of the reasons that Steven (Spielberg) and I have been as successful as we have is because we like the movies. We like to go to the movies. We enjoy movies and we want to make movies like the ones we enjoy.

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 personally am not a huge fan of really gory, scary movies because I'm a wimp. I really like a suspenseful movies and movies that make you think.

My hope is to see people of color in roles that do not emphasize race. Often times when movies are centered around people of color, they are movies where the storyline is based on some racial component. I want to see movies where people of color play more interesting, nuanced characters.

When you make movies, I find that I never have time to go to the movies and enjoy movies like I used to, because I'm so movied out, right, I'm so filmed out that the last thing that I wanna do is with the little spare time that I have is stick in a dark room and watch more stuff on the screen.

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 always feel, I guess being a product of the movies of the 40s where movies were the greatest things and screens were big and palaces were palaces and stars were larger than life that reality was so much inferior to what we felt was conceivably possible from what we had seen in the movies.

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.

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.

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].

Harrison Ford is a great actor and he's and lovely man and a great father and all of these things, I got to just meet him as a person and someone I respect as an actor.I'd never seen any 'Indiana Jones' movies or 'Star Wars' movies. My husband made me watch the Indiana Jones trilogy, I just was like fanboy Comic-Con geeked out. It was amazing I didn't show up to set with a whip and a hat.

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

Unfortunately, 'chick flick' has become a term to describe most movies that I don't even like. They're these movies that, yes, have women in them but they really don't reflect who women are, and there's something kind of silly or shallow or gossipy about them.

I don't like doing movies, period. Movies are hard. I like TV.

There are conservatives in Hollywood who make good movies. They just don't make conservative movies because that's not what gets funded.

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.

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.

My existence is about making movies, so I've just got to rock and roll with the punches. You want to make movies on telephones, I'm there.

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'm a huge Bob Hope fan, up until about the late '50s. I've seen so many of his movies up until then, and they're a big influence on me and a big influence on Woody Allen, who is basically just ripping off Bob Hope for his first five or six movies.

I like all of the mental, psychological thriller movies too. I enjoy horror movies across the board.

The thing that's nice about working with Adam [Sandler] is that there's sort of a family vibe, cause people who have worked on his movies have worked on many of his movies, so along with the kids and the cast, all the people that worked on the movie, it was like a family and every day we'd make each other laugh.

I look at movies, unfortunately, and I still see a lot of movies [lacking diversity].

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.

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)

I have two little kids and I enjoy watching movies with them, and I can't watch every movie with them. Sometimes it's because it's obviously not appropriate to watch The Bourne Identity with your kids, but a lot of times it's because it's torture to watch the movies that they want to watch, as a parent.

I just went to Times Square and the underground movies, sometimes three a day. I did get my education. But I really believed then, in 1966, they would not have allowed me to make any of the movies I made. Today, you could make a snuff movie at NYU and get an A.

Everybody who's making the movies needs to work hard to make sure they're good. And if you don't show up and see the movies and support them financially, no one is going to make them. It's going to change unless it makes money. That's the long and short of it. You have to give in to the fact that it's a business.

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.

People look at technology as sometimes an end to things, and it isn't an end in certain cases. In the movie business, the act of creating in the art form of movies, the craft of movies is completely technical, and that's all it is.

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.

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.

It's all about commerce. Movies are not made like paintings, where you can make them for free and put them at the side. Movies are supposed to make money.

I wrote an article not so long ago that was published in the Los Angeles Times, and I think I titled it "Movies vs. History." But I think they had another title for it. I got sort of sick and tired of seeing movies that got picked apart by people because they had taken dramatic or poetic license and I said "These people don't understand the distinctions."

We just don't want to repeat anything that we've done in the movies [X-man] or that we're going to do in the movies. There's so many stories to tell, we just want to stay out of each other's way.

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.”

American movies show you how to fight and break armsand necks. I want to make the action in my movies like dancing.

I've always loved movies but everyone loves movies, so I never conceived of the fact that I could actually be in them. In high school I had some friends in the drama department, but they were just doing plays, and I was like, "Eh, I don't really think that that's me." So I just played sports. Then, a bunch of years later, I'm acting.

It all felt like a terribly long time. It would have meant that I had to make five movies in five years and if you don't like the movies, too bad. I guess I just wanted my freedom, and I think my life has been incredibly enhanced as a result.

My passion is doing movies, and as long as I keep doing that, I'll be happy. I want to do movies, fun roles and dramatic ones. I love all of it.

If I wanted to make spy movies for the rest of my life, that would be one thing, but I don't want to just make spy movies.

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 was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn't care what kind of movies I made.

Along with supernature and science, there is one other major source of horror movies disorder: the human psyche, most commonly homicidal psychosis. Unlike 'mad' scientists, horror-movies madmen are not visionary obsessives, glorifying in scientific reason as they single-mindedly purse their researches. They are, rather, victims of overpowering impulses that well up from within; monsters brought forth by the sleep of reason, not by its attractions.