Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just adored 'Shaun Of The Dead.' That's a true mashup. That's a real Romero-era zombie movie and a real Gen X indie comedy. That was before zombie movies were cool, before 'Zombieland' and 'I Am Legend,' and now it has become a whole sub-genre.
I remember watching the 'Iron Man' cartoons when I was younger. I remember reading the origin stories and some of the Silver Age stuff, and I read 'The Avengers' - 'The Defenders' and then 'The Avengers' - and that sort of brought me into 'Iron Man.'
The ultimate storyteller is Shakespeare, who was able to get the 'groundlings' to laugh at his bawdy humor and storylines but could still be studied by scholars to this day for the complexity of his language, meter, and symbolism. That's the real guy.
People think bigger movies are bad, and that's just not true - there's bad big films, and there's bad little ones. The bad big ones have to make their money back, so they'll push them down your throat, but the little ones just disappear if they're bad.
Get the shading right, the lighting right, and there are things you can do to make the CGI look more real. People end up going crazy and give themselves a little too much freedom in how they use CGI, and if you overuse it, it draws attention to itself.
Online theft has changed the business model of filmmaking because the DVD market is very soft. So, more ambitious, compelling, character-driven narrative of a certain budget level isn't really a viable business model in the eyes of the studios right now.
It's great to be able to connect parents with children both emotionally and through humor. I look forward to exploring family entertainment once again and examining the specifics of our day-to-day lives against the backdrop of an extraordinary adventure.
I'm a very lazy person by nature. I have to be really engaged, and then I go straight from lazy to obsessive. I couldn't study chemistry, but I could memorize all the books for Dungeons and Dragons. It was ridiculous. The trick is to find what I like to do.
Hopefully we'll figure out how to get 'Iron Man 2' going, and I'll be involved with that. You have got to outdo what you did before. So, if the last one took two years, we would need at least that to do what we are talking about or, at least, thinking about.
'Made' is about opening your heart to people who deserve your love and not trying to turn other people into something that they're not: not trying to save people who don't want to be saved. If you go down that dark path, you're not going to end up doing any good.
You don't get to see your family much. In the movie business, directors often go out of town for long periods of time, and even if you're in town, you're working 14-15 hour days. People tend to not balance out the important things in their lives with their career.
David Anspaugh, who was my first director, on 'Rudy,' was all about empowering the actor, making you feel comfortable and appreciated, allowing you to keep your dignity, and treating you like a man. Being treated like a grown-up makes you proud to be involved in a film.
I like happy endings in movies. I think life has a happy ending. When it's all said and done, it's all something worthwhile, and I want my movies to reflect that. There are enough things to be sad about. When you pop in a movie, let the message be one that's one of hope.
You have an hour and a half or two hours - maybe two and a half hours - in a movie, and it has to be a self-contained three-act structure. It's like a rock and roll song. Certain things have to happen for it to be a toe-tapper and get people excited, leaving the theater.
When you're going for a big studio comedy, the joke tally better be pretty high, and you better have some big comedy set pieces. That was one of the issues when I was trying to get 'Swingers' made for the first time, which is that there weren't any broad comedy set pieces.
I like a naturalism to my dialogue and my comedy. I would rather have a few jokes sail by that might be more subtle than have every single joke hit hard. I would rather the comedy come out of character as opposed to feeling forced. Even if you're giving some laughs up for it.
When it comes to celebrities and tabloids, to me that is a bummer. That's a little disappointing. And it is amazing how things really get made. I always used to think that where there is smoke there is fire, and now I see stories pop up out of nowhere with no basis in reality.
For me, I love food. It's my greatest pleasure and also the thing that could ruin you as well. It's one of those things where, if you're not thoughtful about it, it could be unhealthy. But if there's a mindfulness about it; it actually is a wonderful tool of emotional expression.
For something to be profitable doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing in the world for the director. You judge a movie by different standards - I've worked on comedies, and now I've worked on superhero movies, and the reviews are almost parenthetical in both of those genres.
When Ron Howard does 'Rush,' he has to learn and steep himself in F1 culture and European racing culture, and that's part of the fun of the gig. You learn to learn. Your real skill as a director is being a learner and an observer. You're constantly learning another thing in context.
I think what is nice about 'Elf,' and why it doesn't play as one long sketch, is that the character actually grows up during the course of the film. It's not just a character that you can keep checking in on and keep doing sketches about. It's a story. I'm pretty proud of how we told it.
Once you buy into a television show, there doesn't have to be resolution from week to week. You can develop characters and storylines and react to the audience, so you get more of a serialized version of storytelling where you can go much deeper into each character. It's more like a novel.
You show people playing poker or hacking into a computer; it feels so significant in the script, and then when you see it on the screen, it loses something. But there's something about cooking - food being prepared is incredibly captivating. It became just a fun box of tools to use as a director.
There is nothing as fun as making a cultural splash with a movie. Sometimes the splash happens, like with 'Swingers,' where it sort of slowly ripples out, yet everybody could quote it. Or it could be something like 'Elf,' where you just make a big splash right off the bat when the movie comes out.
I've been fascinated by the world ever since I read 'Kitchen Confidential' by Anthony Bourdain. I've watched 'Top Chef' and watched interviews with chefs on 'Charlie Rose'... I thought they're really intriguing characters, and they really encapsulate that tension between vision and commerce, art and commerce.
I don't want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven't studied cinema can't appreciate it. By the same token, I don't want to be the guy who's making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater.
Between the theme parks and the movies, the Disney iconography was probably the first set of archetypes that I was exposed to. Walt was able to expose me as a child to the full array of emotions, including fear and sorrow. Those movies and attractions haunted my dreams and made a deep impression on me as a child.
I don't 'handle' people. It's so much easier to manipulate actors than to really have an earnest discussion with them. It's very easy to say whatever's going to appease them and then turn around and do whatever you want to do. It's difficult to be forthright with people, because the job does not lend itself to that.
I'll basically eat anything that a chef puts in front of me. One of the reasons is respect for the chef. I watch chefs eat at other chefs' restaurants, and they're very aware not to leave anything over because the chef is watching very closely. It's a very sincere interaction when two chefs are cooking for one another.
I think the bigger the movie is, the harder it is to maintain the idea of an auteur. You're servicing something beyond just your own vision. Whenever there's a lot of money on the line, it is your responsibility to make sure that you're doing your best to have people not lose their money and to actually win by betting on it.
The title's 'Cowboys & Aliens,' so you can get away with a lot if you chose to. You could make it the union of Cowboys Movies and Alien Movies and done whatever was convenient at any given moment. I think that's what most people would do, especially if you went broader and more comedic. Do whatever's the most fun in the moment.
I've hit a point where my big luxury is getting to work on the things I want to work on. That's my hobby. It's being able to do a movie like 'Chef,' where you don't get paid, where you get paid scale, but you get to do exactly the movie you want to do. To me, that's worth more to me than whatever money I would have gotten paid.
I was 22 and had worked on Wall Street for a year, and quit my job. I bought a motorcycle and sort of had this fantasy that I'd go cross-country like 'Easy Rider.' I went from New York to L.A., and on the way back, I stopped in Chicago and saw a friend of mine who was into improv. And I figured it might be fun to give it a shot.
For years, I was watching other people have so much fun playing out their version of authorship, like Louis C.K. and Larry David. As I watched them do their thing, I began to pine for the days when I had a lot less expected of me and, often, a lot more creative freedom. The courage that those guys have is always captivating to me.
To see talented people in roles that others might not see them in, to see how they might fit in the puzzle of the cast, has always been something that I've been good at. I think that if you look at the successes of my films and start to peel them back, there's usually a really smart casting decision that has gone into that success.
Movies like 'Chef' are not really box-office monsters in the summertime and don't really fit into Hollywood's business model any longer. Even if 'Chef' is successful, it will be successful in the context of what it is. There's a limited upside to a film that's so small, but there's also limited exposure for the people who backed me.
I think that part of the reason that 'Iron Man' was so successful was that we really chose to break new ground in a new area tonally, cast wise, the way we depict the hero, what his abilities are. It felt fresh in a genre that is beginning to feel stale if it's not done with the proper amount of inspiration and a strong voice or tone.