Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's S-VOD, which is 3 1/2 months after the theatrical release. The windows are going to get closer and closer, and the sooner they collapse in my mind the better it'll be for everybody. It's coming, but change is hard. It will be more profitable for everybody, including exhibitors.
A lot of times, it's easy to trim the movie 'cause you just start losing things that you thought would be there just for amusement's sake that actually are not funny. My favorite part of the process is seeing it with an audience. I do about eight previews to see how things are working.
I think [aging] has nothing to recommend it. You don't gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you'd trade all of that for being 35 again.
The Jewish culture - people that are Jewish have a certain cultural habit that they've formed and one of those habits is an appreciation of theater and music - these are cultural things one does associate with values that are promulgated by Jewish families. I think that's a good thing.
When I was working on 'Men of Honor' with Robert De Niro, there's a pipe that he has in the movie, and it took us about six weeks to find the right pipe for him to use and feel comfortable with. It was a great choice, because it was really about what worked with the camera at that time.
Frank [Zappa] always wanted to do a sound library - he sampled so many great musicians. For piano, for example, he sampled every octave, not just one (that you could just transpose electronically), and he did all different types of attack, with and without pedals, all that kind of stuff.
'Fast and Furious' is the only franchise that I've directed that I did not create from scratch. So it definitely was an eye-opening experience for me coming to that world. I had to be respectful of the roles that had been established by the filmmakers before me, and I was cool with that.
I love being the underdog. It's one of the reason I like making horror movies, because a lot of people don't like them or are prejudiced against them. So it's one of the many reasons I like horror and it's also the reason I like low budget, because it automatically makes us the underdog.
I think people really don't understand what a producer does versus what a director does. I mean, the producer is often the person that is on the movie the longest - it's their material that they are then bringing the director onto to bring it to the screen. Are we overlooked? Absolutely.
I remember when I took Quentin Tarantino with me to a very private screening of the documentary 'Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,' which shows some of the legal irregularities of his case. I was involved by the film, and it was an amazing experience to see people weep at the end of it.
I've made movies on every part of the spectrum, and you do understand when you go into certain movies that you're trying to elicit a certain kind of response from the audience, and people get a real sense of satisfaction when they're rooting for a character and the character pulls it off.
It's always hard when you make a movie that's fundamentally about kids for adults. How do you make people aware of who the adult cast is without making them feel that the adults are the center of it? You don't want to make it misleading, but at the same time you want to make it appealing.
When I started out, I was a television writer, and we wrote a television show that was on live every week. And you didn't have the luxury of coming in and waiting to be inspired. You came in and you had to write. And you wrote, because it was going to be live on the air. So I can do that.
I've been in, like, kids' clubs... I've been in the Boom Boom Room in New York, and the kids are going, 'Oh my God, you produced 'Arrested Development?'' They aren't talking about 'A Beautiful Mind' or '24.' It's like the only thing in my whole career was 'Arrested Development,' literally.
Being on a set where the director has lost control is just sickening. No one goes the extra mile, theres a lot of eye-rolling... it just breeds inertia. If a director is in control, the crew follow their leader. But the second anyone senses the directors are not sure, people just swoop in.
There have been times that we've had arguments with Brad [Dourif] because he comes in with very strong ideas and, as in any working relationship, sometimes you're going to disagree, and he always goes to the mat and I've just always appreciated that attitude, that he takes it so seriously.
I always try to better myself with every movie I make. I don't take anything sitting back, and so I try to learn from every film I make and carry that onto the next movie because I think it's important as a filmmaker to keep growing with each film, and I think I am growing with each movie.
I am so picky about what films I get myself into because it's such an explosion of energy and commitment once you get in there, you destroy your life until you deliver these films. I never want to be in the position of making films that won't be a great use of 90 minutes of someone's life.
Being true to yourself involves showing and sharing emotion. The spirit that motivates most great storytellers is 'I want you to feel what I feel,' and the effective narrative is designed to make this happen. That's how the information is bound to the experience and rendered unforgettable.
Frightening for many artists is promoting themselves. They feel it is... artificial and not what we want to be known for. Yet if we start thinking about what we do as important and important to offer to people, not to sell... it allows us to shift the way we think about promoting ourselves.
We really want to send the message that commanders need to understand and be accountable. We saw that with the Catholic Church. No one cared when they went after the priests, but when they focused on the bishops then things began to change. And we see that analogy working with the military.
Being on a set where the director has lost control is just sickening. No one goes the extra mile, there's a lot of eye-rolling... it just breeds inertia. If a director is in control, the crew follow their leader. But the second anyone senses the directors are not sure, people just swoop in.
It is supposed that power corrupts,' the caterpillar said in a voice as untroubled as time itself. "yet the powerful are often corrupt before they are powerful. In fact, I find that they too often become powerful by being corrupt. Whether real or perceived, a lack of power can also corrupt.
One of the things I tried to do is to kind of talk my actors through the scene, but at the same time let them know how I plan to shoot the film and just give them an insight into the way I'm thinking, so that when they're acting out their scene, they can kind of see it in their minds' eyes.
I'm always surprised when you do something very different that people don't get behind you more, because you're always told, "Take chances! Stretch!" And when you do it, sometimes people get really supportive and excited, but sometimes people go at you because you've tossed out the formula.
My dad was a big fan of comedy. He wanted to be a stand-up. He loved Lenny [Bruce]. He also loved Lord Buckley and jazz and stuff. He was a hipster. My parents were kind of beatnik-y, you know, for Salt Lake City. But my humor, I think, came from wanting to disarm people before they hit me.
There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it's because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it's still better than skipping through a meadow.
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 think the most honest responses to the movies you get to watch are in houses and people's most private spaces, like the bedroom or in your own intimate space. I think that's where you feel safest, so when you're threatened in the place you feel safest, it makes for the scariest situations.
Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne made very good money from both 'Insidious' movies. Word travels fast, so as soon as you have a success and do what you say you're going to do in a contract and pay out that money, we had a lot more established actors come to us and say they want to work with us.
I grew up in Mobile, Alabama - somebody's got to be from Mobile, right? - and Mobile sits at the confluence of five rivers, forming this beautiful delta. And the delta has alligators crawling in and out of rivers filled with fish and cypress trees dripping with snakes, birds of every flavor.
There's an overlap of people we've used from previous films and we also like to obviously bring in new people so we get a fresh voice and opinion when you bring them in. All different ages and genders and everything, you just want a wide spectrum of people who are coming in to see what works.
I think the only thing that we know how to do is look at our characters and ask what is the character doing right now and what do we need to do, and tell it from that place. If we really make it character driven and theme driven, I think we're going to offer up something new for the audience.
I don't feel so strongly against remakes, but if I don't like it, I guess I just don't do it. It is what it is. Hollywood is driven by the financial system, so if they think that it has a brand and people are going to go see it because it's a recognizable property, they're going to remake it.
I'm riveted by extreme sports like big-wave surfing, 'megaramp' skateboarding and half-pipe snowboarding. I'm fascinated partly because the sports are so exhilaratingly acrobatic. But I'm also captivated by the fear that a terrible accident might happen at any moment. And accidents do happen.
A lot of people get very misty-eyed about celluloid. When I think of the time that's wasted in sending it back to the lab and having it developed and brought back, it would make me insane. I love getting my hands on the stuff immediately. That doesn't work for everybody. It just works for me.
All over the world, relationships between men and women are very, very tricky and very difficult and you don't learn anything. It's not an exact science, so you can't learn anything. You're always going by instinct and your instinct betrays you because you want what you want when you want it.
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.
My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it.That's how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive.
I think, there were probably problems with show business where producers and directors would try to get the writing credit also. So they created a rule where the bar, to get your name added to the writing credits, if you've done a revision, is very high if you're also the producer or director.
Right when I started getting solid was when I was offered a lot of writing work. And when The Ben Stiller Show was picked up, I realized there was no way for me to do stand-up three or four nights a week and run this television show with Ben. So that was the moment when I had to make a choice.
I stayed in the East for about a year after I graduated. Then, I came out to Los Angeles and started knocking on doors and working my way up. This was the '70s. I had been told how tough it was for a woman trying to make it in Hollywood, but I sort of had blinders on. I just did things anyway.
Maybe this is my left-wing conspiracy theory, but the right has re-branded itself as kind of the everyman party: Who's the person you'd rather have a beer with? The Republican Party, even though it's a party of incredible wealth and corporate interests, has hidden behind this everyman quality.
Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together, and if you're really working, you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.
Ray Bradbury was the first author that I was really exposed to back in grade school. I'm a big Philip K. Dick fan, but the emotion and humanity that Bradbury brings to his stories and the way he uses sci-fi to get at the human heart is something that's unique and for me incredibly influential.
Back in the old days, everyone was shocked if a band had a sponsor for their tour. Now, Bob Dylan can do a commercial for Victoria's Secret and people don't really blink; the Beatles' songs are in all sorts of commercials these days and it doesn't seem to offend anybody. The times are changing.
My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it. That's how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive.
When I naturally write a story and I feel that the guy is sitting across the table from the girl and flirting with her... I think, 'God, that can't be me' because I'm just too old for that part. You need a 30-year-old or a 35-year-old for that part. And so I've given myself less and less roles.
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.
I am riveted by extreme sports like big-wave surfing, 'megaramp' skateboarding and half pipe snowboarding. I am fascinated partly because the sports are so exhilaratingly acrobatic. But I am also captivated by the fear that a terrible accident might happen at any moment. And accidents do happen.