Top 25 Scott Rudin Quotes

Anybody who understands how a movie gets made understands that a deep-pockets player is not going to make a movie that has anything defamatory in it without protections.

I was once a fairly angry person.

I’ve done a lot of movies based on real people, real situations, non-fiction books, magazine articles, life rights.

Those critics awards come and go every year, but the finished movie is your work.

Years ago when I was at Fox, I was the executive on ‘Raising Arizona.’

You want reviews to come the week the movie’s opening and not a month before when they do you absolutely no good.

You always feel the ground rumbling beneath your feet, and if you don’t, you’re an idiot. Mostly because it is rumbling beneath your feet, and there is always someone who is coming up behind you who is as good, younger, and, at least as you perceive it, has more energy and more nimbleness than you.

I love stories about women, and I think stories about women are generally pretty underrepresented.

If you have the ability and the wherewithal to create work that’s basically in a discussion with the culture we’re in, how could you not want to do that?

I have a big affinity for the Coen Brothers.

The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing, and put it into a story.

Success is extremely ephemeral and very hard to hold onto.

They say there’s no second act in American lives. There’s something there worth exploring. Giving up an idea of yourself, examining your failure, and seeing if that failure was the system’s or yours. What does it mean to not turn out to be the person you want to be?

I got fired from a movie that ended up being called ‘Windows,’ which Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, directed. I got fired because he refused to cast Meryl Streep, who at the time was at Yale. I told him I thought he was an idiot, and he fired me.

I keep my overhead as low as I can.

Private emails between friends and colleagues written in haste and without much thought or sensitivity, even when the content of them is meant to be in jest, can result in offense where none was intended.

I was 10 years old, taking the train by myself to see Saturday matinees, something you’d never let a kid do now. I got very hooked on it.

Bruce Norris came in twice to audition for ‘The Corrections’ and subsequently spent many months negotiating every point in a four-year agreement to appear in the show.

I know that movies are basically meant to be entertainment, but I’m not that interested in entertainment.

I think you have a responsibility to the people you’re making movies with, and I take that very seriously. I don’t want to let up and I don’t want to let down.

I want to be able to go wherever I want to go, do whatever I want to do. I guard the material and the filmmaker.

You read a script, you try and think through what is the best, most wide-ranging way of telling the story: who stylistically, character-logically, psychologically fits inside the world of what you’re trying to do. A lot of it, when you’re casting, is trying to get yourself in the head of a director.

I want to make serious work that engages with serious subjects. I’m very lucky: I get to more or less make what I want.

If you’re going to spend two or three years of your life working on something, you’ve got to be making the kind of movie that discusses and influences the culture and is engaged in the world you’re living in.

I always loved doing a movie with Daldry. That’s always a huge factor for me.