Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Put in hours and hours of planning, figure everything down to the last detail, then what? Burglar alarms start going off all overthe place for no sensible reason. A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot. And a broken-down old house no good for anything but chasing kids has to trip over us. Blind accidents. What can you do against blind accidents?
Yeah, because we wanted to go back to the original tone. It's one of the original movies like The Muppet Movie, Muppets Take Manhattan, The Great Muppet Caper. Those kinds of movies. So that was really important that we hit that tone and those have a lot of cameos in them and so Jason and I started asking people and everyone we asked just wants to do it.
All these teachers and [screenwriting] books mean you see movies that have been worked over by more committees wielding more rules, that all originality and authorship is lost. That's why you're seeing superstars like Brad Pitt in THE FIGHT CLUB and Tom Cruise in MAGNOLIA. They're desperately searching for people writing and directing off-formula movies.
Here's what I didn't know when I was starting out that I now know…I thought when you were starting out it was really hard to write because you hadn't broken in yet, you hadn't really hit your stride yet. What I found out paradoxically is that the next script you write doesn't get easier because you wrote one before…each one gets harder by a factor of 10.
I went to Berlin and Warsaw and Kraków to do research. Right after we got started, I had already booked this trip, so I went. Seeing the history and the posters, and hearing from the guy certain phrases and words and images, it's stunning how much they're playing from the handbook of the little mustache that isn't Chaplin. With Rudy Giuliani as Mussolini.
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."
Every day is still exciting. I have like a very good system worked out with my editor. Some directors are in there every day, sitting there in the room with the editor. I lose perspective incredibly quickly, and so what I do is I watch...I come in the room and give very specific notes and then I go back to my house or in my office and I watch the dailies.
That's absolutely true, but one problem with the digital revolution, which may tie into what I said earlier, is that there can be a collapse of quality. You may not have liked the decisions made by publishers in the past, you may not have liked the decisions made by magazine editors or newspaper editors in the past. At least there was some quality control
What I love in working on film is just working with actors. It's one thing to write scenes alone over a keyboard and to imagine the actions and reactions in your head, but it's a completely other thing to hear actors speaking your words, to see their bodies bringing the fullness of emotion, need, desire and pain to life right in front of you. It's amazing.
You know something has really stuck in Tim's head when he's drawn what the character looks like. Weird Girl and Elsa actually switched places, at one point. I may be mis-remembering it, but the original design for Weird Girl was actually Elsa, but then it became Winona Ryder's character, and the new Weird Girl was just fantastic with those giant wide eyes.
Even the most loyal viewers of a show would only watch one out of three episodes. As someone who made television, I always found that hard to believe because you want to believe people who love your show are watching every episode, but statistically it was true that people who considered themselves the most loyal viewers were only watching one out of three.
I got into dialogue because my parents began taking me to see plays from when I was very young. Too young, often, to understand the play I was watching: Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf when I was nine years old; That Championship Season when I was ten years old. But I loved the sound of dialogue; it sounded like music to me and I wanted to imitate that sound.
It will come with a rush and a roar and a shudder. It will come howling and laughing and shrieking and moaning. It will come so fast you can’t help yourself you will stretch out your arms to embrace it. You will feel it before it comes and you will tense yourself for acceptance and the earth which is your eternal bed will tremble at the moment of your union.
My casting process was slightly different and slightly interesting insofar as I knew everybody could act. That's something you've seen. You know people can. You've seen them on the screen and you think either they're a good actor or a bad actor. So that's not the point. What I wanted to do was find people who I thought would have a similar comic sensibility.
Too many people are surfing the web and trying to figure out the politics of getting a movie made or taking meetings and trying to get someone to read something instead of creating a truly great script, because something great has a great chance of getting made, but something average that you've sort of talked people into reading doesn't have as good a shot.
I feel certain that the largest part of all photographs ever taken or being taken or ever to be taken, is and will continue to be, portraits. This is not only true, it is also necessary. We are not solitary mammals, like the elephant, the whale and the ape. What is most profoundly felt between us, even if hidden, will reappear in our portraits of one another.
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 felt that making her one-dimensional would be an insult to the audience, and also not as interesting. All destructive people have an inner side to them, and the more three-dimentional your characters are on screen the more compassion you can open up in an audience . . .. To me, that involves the audience more, it stimulates them and asks more of them.
A very wise dog woman once told me that dogs find owners, not the other way around. They pick you and they choose to stay with you. In that way, they are also giving you the end of their life. The deeper the bond, the harder it is to say good-bye. I know I'd rather have any amount of time with a dog I love and suffer the mourning than not have the time at all.
My Father taught me to weigh my words carefully, and speak up only when I had something insightful to add to the proceedings, or something really funny to say. He also taught me that if I couldn’t be that kind of guy in real life, that I could earn a healthy living pretending to be that guy in the movies – particularly when paired up with a long haired stoner.
All the studios are owned by multinational corporations, which are not usually bastions of the left. So all the actors, writers, and directors - or at least a great majority of them - live in fear because we're all insecure, we all want that next job, we all want to be loved, and we don't want to piss off some studio chief who won't hire us for the next movie.
I think change is happening in ways we can't anticipate yet because the whole generation of viewers who are viewing films - film may not be the appropriate word in years to come. I'm excited about the possibility of new types of storytelling; that to me is less daunting. I'm excited by how we'll evolve with those formats thematically, tonally and in narrative.
A criminal has a kind of freedom by definition that the ordinary citizen doesn't have. The criminal's able to realize himself in ways not available to the general population, if you want to put it that way. They're interesting and unpredictable. Characters always have to break some sort of bound or other to be interesting. It also helps if they're paradoxical.
We liked the idea that it was a low-tech future. But everything always repeats the past. If you look today and look at something in the middle east where you got people getting beheaded it's like the crusades with Twitter. It's crazy, human nature does the same thing. In a way, even though you're in the future people wanted order so this sort of system rose up.
I knew I wanted to make a movie that looked decadent and expensive. I knew we would have to make every penny stretch and put as much of the budget onscreen as possible. So it starts with your heads of departments - your production designer, costume, hair and makeup designers. Picking the right people who were as committed as I was to telling the story as I was.
There is a wonderful documentary called 'A Room to Breathe,' where a school brought in a TM instructor, to try and establish a better classroom environment, and the results and transformations were profound. It's impossible to ignore, and we make some passing references in my film, but 'A Room to Breathe' is a closer look at just how powerful meditation can be.
I'm emotionally invested in every movie that I do, period, because you've got to make that commitment. You're spending a year, 18 months of your life doing it. I'm invested in all those kinds of pieces. Most of the films I've had in my career have never tested well. I got lucky that sometimes I got supported by studios - or, at least if not supported, tolerated.
I had my group of friends, and they stayed my group of friends, they were good about that. We all started to succeed at the same time, so that sort of took the curse off it. I didn't have a bunch of people scowling at me and being potentially jealous. I just had good friends who I was able to help, and they helped me. Yet it eventually came to feel debilitating.
There's such an aggressively apolitical movement in the US that anything that smells of being political - even the term "political" is so ridiculous, when you think about it. The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that's what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.
You know what's funny about the people who say mean things? There's a certain part of Twitter that is literally shouting into the void, and then sometimes when the void shouts back it's like, "Whoa! I wasn't expecting that. I got called out." And then if you have a conversation, you find out they like something or they like that or they have questions about that.
After the song [for sausage Party] was finally done, we didn't have enough time, but we thought it would be fun. It also would've thrown it off a bit, because we really are doing more of an homage to Pixar, and if we filled it with songs, it would've felt more like Disney. And we had an experience, while we were making it, that going too Disney made it too weird.
I presume that each country will have a different response to each joke. But mostly what I've seen is that everyone has the same response. The line about: "He hasn't had this much fun since they burned all those kids at Waco..." I thought that might get a real.... it does in America, it gets a shock, as if they fall back in their seats, but then they still laugh.
Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow — it's not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; that the human race is improving; that we have things to be proud of as humans. No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids — human beings built them, because they're clever and they work hard. And Star Trek is about those things.
In January 1912 Leonard proposed marriage. She was unable to answer directly and he pressed further in a passionate letter: 'It isn't, really it isnt, merely because you are so beautiful - though of course that is a large reason & so it should be - that I love you: it is your mind & your character - I have never known anyone like you in that - wont you believe me?
You must always assume that the relationship between writer and producer is that of adversaries - however you slice it. They may be your dearest friends, and they'll invite you to dinner, but when all the smoke clears and the ozone lifts, your enemy is the producer, that's the guy you're competing with, and you have to battle him, just as if you were an adversary.
Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
Boxing is not coming back. There's not going to be a new Ali or a new Tyson. What's happened to movies is happening to boxing-that is, too much availability of alternative, similar entertainment. Movies started to become diluted with the advent of television; that has been mirrored by the dilution of boxing, with kickboxing and absolute, extreme homicidal fighting.
You need a human story to intersect those points of interest with real stakes on the line, and then things start to be fun, where you can see the ramifications, you see the impact on people's lives of big changes - like taking a man of science, like a surgeon, and robbing him of his understanding of the universe and forcing him into a newer and wider understanding.
I never think anyone will like what I do. I'm always terrified the critics won't like my film and of course you always count the people who leave at the screening. They are on your death list. The people who stayed, stayed because they wanted to. You see it in a different way with an audience. And when the screening Is over it's such a relief. It's such a struggle.
You get a kind of surreal feeling and also it allows you to focus on the things we want you to focus on in a new way - the stuff that's very small and mundane that happens in a person's life when they're in a hotel room. There's more interest because you're seeing a puppet do things that you're very familiar with that you might not notice if it was a human doing it.
It was very challenging in terms of making sure that everyone is distinct. Also, we wanted to have some Asian influences as well, so that it really is a mashup. We want evidence of our presence in this world, so you'll see there's an interest in technology, that there are not complex electronics. There's electricity in this world, but computers, circuits don't work.
The scientists who are working 80 hours a week trying to do their science are up against PR guys who know how to spin things and how to create doubt. Creating doubt around tobacco for fifty years when they absolutely knew it caused cancer, that was a real talent. But meanwhile, the scientists, they're not there to go on television. Their brains don't work like that.
One of the things I noticed about the world was - it's funny, in the movie business, you meet a kind of guy who has a lot of money, whether they came by it as an actor or film-studio owner, and you realize these people aren't any smarter than you might be, or any more decent than you might be. It's just this weird fate of the world that it broke one way for someone.
In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.
When I first went into freelancing, I think there was a period of about eight months when nothing happened. Everything that I wrote crumbled up, and then it became a self-destructive thing - when you begin to doubt yourself, when doubt turns into - it's sort of like impotence. Once impotent, you're forever impotent. Because you're always worried about being impotent.
It can be scary to find out you've been wrong about something but we can't be afraid to change our minds, to accept that things are different, that they'll never be the same, for better or for worse. We have to be willing to give up what we used to believe. The more we're willing to accept what is and not what we thought, we'll find ourselves exactly where we belong.
The times are chaotic. For me, I would hope that people look at [Angel] and gain strength by it. With everything that I do, I hope that they see people struggling to live decent, moral lives in a completely chaotic world. They see how hard it is, how often they fail, and how they get up and keep trying. That, to me, is the most important message I'm ever going to tell.
I figured I’d probably write 50 scripts in my life. Out of those 50, I figured maybe five would be produced, and that maybe one or two would be successful. So I always kind of expected I’d write at least one successful film in my life. [...] The way it all came together was kind of like Murphy's law in reverse—I don’t expect that kind of experience again any time soon.
Look at the sky. It’s not dark and black and without character. The black is, in fact deep blue. And over there: lighter blue and blowing through the blues and blackness the winds swirling through the air and then shining, burning, bursting through: the stars! And you see how they roar their light. Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.
What you need to know to direct a movie is [of] such great variety. I've worked with people who were maestros, who know everything. I've worked with people who were empty and lost, who had no clue what they were doing. You wouldn't hire them to paint your apartment. And then there's everything in-between. There's no list of skills you have to have to sit in that chair.