Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't think any of us are normal people.
The subject of an outsider who becomes obsessed.
A prototype is always more expensive than anything.
With each movie I have a different set of inspirations.
One of the things I enjoyed the most is just working as an actor.
I wouldn't say that I'm particularly bothered or obsessed with detail.
I'm very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.
I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience.
And Hackman had really choked up when he was telling it. It was very moving.
Any romantic feelings for a 12-year-old are like entering into a fantasy world.
I didn't think so much of him at first. But now I get it: he's everything that I'm not.
I would like to do a movie in space, but I think it would be difficult to do it on location.
I love working with actors. That's what the set really is, for me. It's my time with the actors.
Animating is a very slow, pain-staking process and the animators become the actors at that point.
What happened to your hand? It got hit by a mirror. How'd that happen? I lost my temper at myself.
Kids are always open to anything. It's very rare that a kid isn't extremely eager to make you happy.
Sometimes if the people are up for trying something that I'm interested in, it can be a great experience.
I just now put [Robert Altman] down feeling heartbroken but happily and deeply inspired. . . . Wonderful.
Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I've never been down before is like going to a movie.
The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.
I don't really look for challenges as much as I like adventures. Other than that I'm just trying to find stories I want to tell.
Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.
I've always loved stop motion animation and I particularly wanted to do stop motion with puppets that have fur, for whatever reason that is.
Anytime I make a movie, I really have absolutely no idea how it's going to go over. I've had the whole range of different kinds of reactions.
I usually set aside a lot of time in advance of a movie with important roles for kids to search, but when you have great ones, they can be a real ace in the hole.
Working with kids is usually very fun. They get so into movie and they're up for anything. Usually they're having such an exciting experience, everybody feels that.
The kids are the ones that have a clarity about what they want. They don't have any wisdom, but they do have a clear understanding about what they want to have happen.
When I see the first dailies on any movie, I usually feel that I had no idea how this combination of ingredients was going to mix together, what it was going to produce.
I've never had a movie that got great reviews. I've had movies that got different levels of good and bad reviews, but you can more or less count on plenty of bad reviews.
Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I've never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.
My experience with casting children is that... the whole movie is going to rest on their shoulders, so you have to set aside time and wait for the perfect people to appear.
Some of the ideas are kind of inspired by the songs, and I always want to use music to tell the story and give the movie a certain kind of mood. That's always essential to me.
When you finish work, practically everybody in that place is going to watch a movie at night anyway. They're tired. They have dinner. They go up to their room. They're watching TV.
Mostly with commercial work, it isn't about personal vision. It's not a personal effort, it's work for hire. That's more my attitude with those. You just want to be a professional worker.
The things that are more my own style are something that I don't really have to think about. The only time I have to think about them is if I want to force myself not to do it the way I do it.
I don't know what is in store for the movie business any better than anybody else does, but it does seem like my kind of movies are a little trickier than it used to be - or maybe a lot trickier.
You don't do background music the way a lot of more conventional films do. The music is often kind of a character in your films to the extent that sometimes you stop and watch someone perform a song.
That's the kind of movie that I like to make, where there is an invented reality and the audience is going to go someplace where hopefully they've never been before. The details, that's what the world is made of.
There's no story if there isn't some conflict. The memorable things are usually not how pulled together everybody is. I think everybody feels lonely and trapped sometimes. I would think it's more or less the norm.
When you're doing a live-action movie, you have your day set up and you're going to do this shot and this shot, and eventually the sun is going to go down. It's a sequential race to whatever is going to end the day.
India is a place where one of the great pleasures for a foreigner is that you're constantly surprised. Everywhere you look is something that is either funny, or very moving, but there is always so much that is so unexpected.
It's not usually that great of an idea to read lots of reviews of your movies, because even if somebody's saying nice things, there'll still be something in there that pushes the wrong button, and it's not really that helpful.
I will say that Edward Norton, who plays the scout master, would be a first-rate Eagle Scout. He's got all those techniques. If your plane crashes into the jungle somewhere, he would be the guy you would want to have with you.
the one thing I've observed over the years is the best way to get an actor to not want to play a certain role is to offer it to them. That makes them say, "Well, maybe it's not that good. These guys don't want me to do this..."
Do you know how writers often say the characters take over... But that is more or less what it always feels like to me, too. Even though that's just a way of describing how your brain is working, it's still what you tend to feel.
A lot of people have said my movies are all the same. But I don't actually make an effort to have a style. I'm usually just thinking of what can we do to make it funnier or more interesting or just kind of refine it and it ends up like that.
I guess when I think about it, one of the things I like to dramatise, and what is sometimes funny, is someone coming unglued. I don't consider myself someone who is making the argument that I support these choices. I just think it can be funny.
On Fantastic Mr. Fox, I got used to working with animated storyboards as a way of planning for the shoot. We did a lot of sequences that way with this movie. Partly as a result of that, I decided to build more sets in order to do certain shots.
Usually when I'm making a movie, what I have in mind first, for the visuals, is how we can stage the scenes to bring them more to life in the most interesting way, and then how we can make a world for the story that the audience hasn't quite been in before.
The only thing that takes away from it is when they steal some music from one of my movies and put it in a TV commercial. I am not crazy about influencing TV commercials. But if I legitimately influence someone making a movie, I think that is really flattering.