Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am a little wary of entering another situation where I would just be another director for hire and I've been doing this in one form or another since I was twenty-two doing documentaries for PBS and HBO.
A little of the sketch character Pootie Tang went a long way on HBO's now late, probably soon to be lamented 'Chris Rock Show.' So it's surprising how much fun the character's film debut, 'Pootie Tang,' is.
HBO is undeniably a leader in meaningful storytelling in a wide array of formats. I'm honored to join the REAL SPORTS team and look forward to continuing my fervor for uncovering unique and impactful stories.
I'm the luckiest women because I do get to spend a lot of time with Gloria Steinem , and not necessarily talking about the show [ HBO's Ms.] - but talking whatever she's working on, and going to events with her.
I'm not joking - it's a top-three dream of mine to be on a comedy on HBO and to have it directed by Mike Judge and Alec Berg, and then on top of that, have it be with friends, two of them I've known for 10 years.
'Behind The Candelabra' is an HBO movie. It's the Liberace story. Michael Douglass and Matt Damon. I play a small part in it. I play a choreographer who introduces, brings Matt Damon to Las Vegas for the first time.
I think network television is really hard because it has to sail right away. HBO's so much more nurturing, patient. They think it takes a while for a show to kind of congeal and figure out what its strong spots are.
I was a big fan of the show 'Deadwood' on HBO, which was created by David Milch. And as soon as I heard that all of those characters on Deadwood were based on real people, the first thing I did was Google everybody.
I landed a job at HBO, working for two years on the 'The Alzheimer's Project,' which aired in May 2009. I was fortunate to work with a great mentor, producer John Hoffman, and the amazing doc filmmaker Susan Froemke.
I think the thing that really started setting my career on the course that it's on is when I did '1000 Cats' on 'Funny or Die Presents' on HBO. That's what I feel like kind of got me a little bit more into the system.
What's great about HBO is they just care about quality. They care about the brand. They're not worried about ratings; obviously they want people to buy subscriptions, but they just want people to be into what's on HBO.
We do have American Idiot picked up by HBO and I wrote the record and concept to it. [We have] the writer Rolin Jones and [director] Michael Mayer [who also directed the Broadway production], so we'll see what happens.
HBO spent a huge amount of money on 'Game Of Thrones,' and it won't be able to keep spending the money if it can't make it back from people watching it legitimately. It will have an effect on the quality of the programme.
I would love 'Awkward Black Girl' to be on television, with the right team of people who understand and get it. If 'Awkward Black Girl' could make it to HBO starring a dark-skinned black girl, that would be revolutionary.
There are some extremely acceptable male comedians out there: Joel Osteen, Abraham Lincoln, the man who played Phil Spector in HBO's 'Phil Spector.' But even those guys, while insightful and amusing, aren't exactly funny.
HBO spends almost a month perfecting an episode. They shoot at the same speed that you would shoot a major motion picture, and they give you all of the things that you need to succeed. They really do support their artists.
I had one kid with the birth control pill, I had one with the diaphram and I had one with the I.U.D. I don't even know what happened with my I.U.D. It never came out. But I have my suspicions because that kid picks up HBO.
The movies I've made, I'm really proud of them. But the experience I've had is, people say to me, 'Oh my God, I saw your movie on HBO. It was actually funny.' Like, that's always the experience. It's a backhanded compliment.
We tend to forget that in those days before the Internet and HBO and Imax and 3-D cinema, opera was the thing. Opera and theatre. If you were a man of the world and you mingled among the happy few, you would be at the opera.
Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.
I really was interested in doing something for a premium channel like Showtime or HBO, just because you get to really let loose. I think they let their storylines go wherever they want, and it's really a special place to work.
But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.
I was watching an HBO special on eating habits and different cultures, and they showed in China how people eat cats ... I happened to be sitting on the couch with my cat, and once I saw that, it just put everything in perspective.
Over the years, TV has gotten so much better, especially with the advent of cable. The bar has been raised. I think HBO really set the standard with 'The Sopranos,' and then on mainstream TV, shows like 'Lost' broke amazing ground.
It used to be that you had to do a certain number of episodes to hit syndication in order to try to keep a show on, because it's important to the network because it sells good commercial time. That's really not how HBO does things.
I've been sort of spoiled on the TV end because HBO feels like a small institution making independent movies. There's respect for the director's contribution in a way that mainstream television doesn't really reflect, I don't think.
Mick Jagger also a music connoisseur and knows everything about that era. So, you knew the music side was going to be top-notch. It's HBO. On Men of Certain Age, if we wanted a song, it would break the bank. But, Vinyl can go all-out.
When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival.
HBO was a big thing for stand-up, and when you're a broke kid with absolutely nothing to do on the weekend, there was always video recording your HBO specials. I would just rewind those specials and watch them like they were new again.
I recently finished a job, an HBO movie 'Getting On,' a very dark comedy. It comes from a British series of the same name. In this role I have no hair, no make up and no nails. I play a very small role; she is not over the top and sassy.
I give my roosters the best of food. I give them the best of care. I give them everything they want before I ask them to sacrifice. Get a rooster comfortable, and he'll fight his ass off. That's all I ask of HBO. They just can't see that.
'24' and 20th Century Fox and Sky TV are not responsible for training the U.S. military. It is not our job to do. To me, this is almost as absurd as saying, 'The Sopranos' supports the mafia, and by virtue of that, HBO supports the mafia.'
To a bystander like me, those who made 190 million pounds deliberately underselling the shares of HBOS, in spite of its very strong capital base, and drove it into the bosom of Lloyds TSB Bank, are clearly bank robbers and asset strippers.
You look at 'Survivor's Remorse.' Or 'Blackish.' Or Issa Rae's brilliant, funny 'Insecure,' which started out on YouTube but is now on HBO. And you see multifaceted representations of the African-American experience. It's insanely exciting.
I'm interested in the relationships of people. I'm interested in the darker moments within us. All those aspects of human behavior, I'm fascinated by. But in the times we're in, those are hard movies to make. So if I can do it at HBO, fine.
I don't like swearing on the air. As a matter of fact, I'm not a prude, but... I watch HBO and some of the comedy stuff, and I'm constantly asking myself, 'Why have we gone there?' It seems like it's unfortunate. It's so cheap. It's so easy.
It was great fun being part of a TV series that I'd been a fan of for five years. I've been watching it every single Monday when with my wife. It was like a ritual - every Monday night on HBO Nordic, we would watch 'Game of Thrones' together.
One of the differences between HBO and other television is that they demand the same coverage that you would have in a feature film. We need to have all the shots in order to make it as rich and as stunning as it looks. We can't cut any corners.
I was opposed to doing TV for a long time because I thought the quality of writing wasn't very strong, as opposed to film, but there's been a shift in term of the quality of scripts. HBO has attracted a tremendous amount of great writing talent.
Rest in peace, Harold Lederman. When I was younger, my brother and I used to imitate his famous 'OK, Jim!' line while watching the big 'HBO Boxing' events. What an amazing character he was, and while I never met him, he seemed to be a lovely man.
Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories.
I'm really a big fan of HBO and Showtime shows, so I wouldn't mind being on an edgy show... where I could challenge myself to do gritty stuff - a homeless guy or just some guy with a lot going on who's got problems. It's more fun to do as an actor.
Television has changed. There's obviously the generic shows, but on HBO and AMC, there are some really great series, so I'm not closed off to television. If there's an amazing role with amazing people and a great story, I'd definitely be open to it.
I wrote a script - a script about a guy working on the automobile assembly line; I never could get money for that. I did a pilot about minimum wage workers for HBO that didn't get picked up; they thought it was depressing, even though it was a comedy.
This woman [Lena Dunham] makes up being raped or something at Oberlin College and then she did commercials for Hillary [Clinton] so she's a darling, she ran that TV show at HBO. HBO's a left-wing enclave. It's worshiped. And so she benefits from that.
I went to college for communications, so I came out and said I wanted to work for the greatest communications company, and I ended up at HBO - and I couldn't have been happier. And now, as an actress, I wound up back at HBO - and they truly are the best.
When 'Sex and the City' aired its first season, people didn't know about HBO as a place for original series. People weren't saying, 'Oh I've got to watch 'Sex and the City'!' They found it later. In some ways, it helped change what people thought of HBO.
January 14, 2000, was my first time on stage, and I've been hooked ever since. I got discovered nationally in Seattle by the now-defunct HBO Comedy Festival, and that led to an appearance on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' and a path to a professional comedy career.
If you're doing a prison show, HBO is the absolute best place in the world to be doing that because you're not going to have to do all that, you know, 'Prison Break' stuff where you can't really behave and speak like people do in a maximum-security prison.
On its surface, the HBO documentary series 'Hard Knocks,' about the New York Jets' training camp, resembles another HBO series, 'The Sopranos.' Both star the stout patriarch of a New Jersey 'family' preoccupied with food, intimidation, and florid profanity.