Top 55 Jason Reitman Quotes

‘Looper’ is about what your 55-year-old self would tell your 25-year-old self over a cup of coffee. It’s about finding love in the third act of your life. It’s about overcoming trauma and the idea of true sacrifice.

I’m a kind of private guy.

I think romance is a tool, comedy is a tool and drama is a tool. I really just want to tell stories that challenge the viewer, move people, make you laugh, perhaps push an idea about being open-minded but never settle on a genre or an opinion. I hate genre. I like movies that are original in their approach.

The first set I remember was ‘Ghostbusters.’ It was a scene in which the street erupted. I remember even at seven years old thinking, ‘Wow, if you direct a movie, you can break the streets of New York.’

Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.

If someone else made ‘Up in the Air’ or ‘Thank You For Smoking’ or ‘Juno,’ I would have wanted to rip their head off. I need that same sort of passion for every project I take on.

Growing up sucks, doesn’t it? I understand why people wouldn’t want to get old – but it’d be one thing if we became a culture obsessed with eating right, doing yoga, going to therapy and becoming at one with ourselves. That be great. But we don’t do that. We seem to be obsessed with all the wrong ways to stay young.

‘Alien’ asked ground-breaking questions about eco-politics and female empowerment. ‘The Matrix’ delved deeper into the concept of perception versus reality than perhaps any other film I know. But for some reason, we tend not to remember the significance of their writing.

And over the course of the last six years, as I’ve directed more features and commercials, I’ve become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.

I think it’s a mistake for young filmmakers to just buy digital equipment and shoot a feature. Make short films first, make your mistakes and learn from them.

I want my movies to be audience experiences. As much as I like Michael Haneke, I’m not going to make a Haneke film. That’s just not in my DNA.

I remember when I was like 19 years old and I started a desk calendar company to pay for my first short film, just so I could say one day that my daddy didn’t pay for my first short film. And I really established myself in the film festival world.

Directing ‘The Office’ is kind of like someone going, ‘Would you like to drive my Lamborghini?’ And I’m like ‘Yes, I would like to drive your Lamborghini. That sounds like fun.’

I laugh a lot in horror films. If I’m scared in a horror film, I try to think about what’s scaring me… particularly, if it’s a bad movie, but something they’re doing still works. It’s the same way I look at comedy. I’ve always had an intellectual view of comedy, and what makes people laugh, and how does it work.

I went to college, I went pre-med, I thought I was going to be a doctor.

Things like Facebook have made you feel as though you’re connected to everybody. You’ve got a thousand friends on Facebook, but you don’t actually talk to anybody. You’re not close to anybody.

Everyone wants to be loved; everyone wants to know where they’re going in life; everyone wants to have a sense of direction and feel the next day is going to be better than today. We just all deal with it in a different way.

Doesn’t every generation feel like the one that’s coming up behind them doesn’t know how to grow up? I’m not sure if we’re progressively getting worse or if your perspective shifts.

My writing voice is very much like ‘Thank You for Smoking.’ It’s a guy’s voice. It’s very masculine.

My high-school years were so mediocre – I moved out when I was 16 and started living with my girlfriend who was 10 years older. Apart from that, I was just a video nerd.

I’m not Michael Moore. I think Michael Moore wants to tell you how to think. He wants to give you answers. I make movies to raise my own personal questions and not to give answers.

And the biggest improvement I see between ‘Up in the Air’ and ‘Juno’ and ‘Thank You for Smoking’ is that ‘Up in the Air’ deals with the complicated human stuff in a way that my other films have not. It’s a more articulated film, and because of that, I’m most proud of it.

‘Juno’ really changed things for me and I get a lot of screenplays come in now, but I like to self-generate and I like to kind of pursue my own ideas. And I think the more personal the better.

I really enjoy theater. I just went to see ‘Death of a Salesman,’ and it knocked me on my ass.

When you’re young, you want to make every kind of film: musicals, Westerns, horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small, personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters.

I used to have a group called Bad-Movie Saturday. Every Saturday, six of us would go see the worst movie that came out each weekend. It’d be noon in Burbank. It was just a running commentary. All executives – we would each talk through the movie and make jokes.

I don’t believe in director’s cuts where you make things longer. The coolest thing was when the Coen brothers did a director’s cut of ‘Blood Simple,’ and they made it shorter.

And as a director, you make 1,000 decisions a day, mostly binary decisions: yes or no, this one or that one, the red one or the blue one, faster or slower. And it’s the culmination of those decisions that define the tone of the film and whether or not it moves people.

Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.

I’ve been very, very lucky in my career, in my life – from day one. When aspiring directors say, ‘What’s your advice?’ first I say, ‘Be born the son of a famous director. It’s invaluable.’

I am an obsessive flyer, myself.

Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood – all those things feel really true to me.

Filmmaking is a completely imperfect art form that takes years and, over those years, the movie tells you what it is. Mistakes happen, accidents happen and true great films are the results of those mistakes and the decisions that those directors make during those moments.

I always believed that you can make challenging films, but they should be fiscally responsible.

When characters change on screen, it makes you feel better about yourself. You think, ‘Oh I change too, I’m constantly becoming a better person.’

I find nice people kind of boring.

When I think of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ there was a warmth to those teenagers that I related to. They were not aware that they were in the middle of a horror film, and I really loved those characters and I empathized with them.

Everything I’ve wanted to turn into a film becomes something new and different when it becomes a movie… Each time I work with an author, I say to them, ‘A book and a movie are different things.’

As far as writing, I like watching bad movies. Nothing stops me in my tracks more than watching a great film like ‘The Godfather’ or ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ or ‘The Graduate.’ You watch one of those, and you never want to write again. Whereas with bad movies, it makes you think, If that counts, I certainly could write.

It’s easy to get caught up in a moment and think, ‘Oh, I’ve been offered some giant studio film or a superhero franchise or some actor wants to meet with me about a project they want to do.’ And it’s easy to get caught up in a moment because it’s flattering. But you can’t do a movie because it’s flattering.

I don’t want to make films that give you the answer. If there is a message to my films – and I hope there isn’t – it’s to be open-minded.

Well, Toronto, I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I’ve made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time – they are my audience. They’re the people that I think about while I’m writing, directing, and editing. I specifically make movies for them.

Being the son of a filmmaker, you are aware of a career as a director. You don’t think of it as just movies, but as a life.

There are only so many movies you can direct. And yet there are movies that I want to make sure make it to the screen in as honest a way as possible.

Most people see a documentary about the meat industry and then they become a vegetarian for a week.

I hear the way people talk about the children of famous people. They’re not treated very well. The presumptions are usually quite awful. So I tried to establish myself with a couple of movies. After ‘Juno’ I thought: ‘I think I’ve defined myself enough as my own director that I’d love to work with my father.’

All the airports kind of feel and look the same now. Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you’re going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You’re going to get your coffee and the ‘USA Today’ or ‘New York Times’ in every airport.

Unlike with any other art form, filmmakers have this unique web of festivals. There are hundreds. It is a democratic system in which you submit films, and if they are good enough, they play. The only barrier to entry is the submission fee.