Top 18 Lawrence Kasdan Quotes

The great thing about Stephen is that he sees the movie as a separate thing, I think. He wants it to capture the essence of the book, and if he feels that’s been done, then he’s not too particular about the details. I think that’s why he’s happy.

I haven’t seen Clones, which has been during this period when I haven’t seen much of anything, but I did see Phantom Menace, and see my feelings about it – see, first of all, I think that when you make a lot of movies, your attitude about the movies changes.

It’s hard enough to get any movie made, and when you take on these tough genres – and I’ve done it a couple times – it just makes the whole struggle more.

I loved Alien, and I loved Carrie, and I loved The Exorcist – those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place.

I really liked Carrie a lot. That was one of Brian De Palma’s best movies.

I didn’t really want to do another sequel. I go to those movies, and I just sort of enjoy them like a viewer.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

I mean, I really liked those guys and the experience of doing Raiders was really good for me, but I did not really want to be involved – I only did Jedi, as I really owed George a favor.

I mean, the trouble with some of the kind of relationship movies I’ve done, is there’s only so many ways you can shoot a conversation. I was really tired of talking heads.

The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.

What you hope for, like Unforgiven did a lot to give you a chance to do it again sometime.

With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it’s empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that.

The kind of pace that you want to use in a Western – just to acknowledge the land in the distance that everyone has to travel, and the way things develop sort of slowly – it’s almost the antithetical of what’s currently going on in the movies, you know.

I tell you, I feel like a real novice as far as horror goes.

That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.

But, George and Steven asked me to write the Indiana Jones sequels, and I didn’t want to.

Any story that Billy Wilder told, you can tell in a Western.