That’s why modern corporate movie making has become so laborious that comedians are kind of kicked out by 50.
When a movie is being rolled out, the studio publicists and all our individual publicists get together and come up with bullet points and talking points – ‘Make sure you stay away from this,’ and ‘Don’t say that quite that way, because that quote can be taken out of context,’ and that kind of thing.
Pete Davidson – he’s in the movie ‘Trainwreck.’ He has a small part in it. I told Lorne Michaels about him, said he was really funny.
The great thing about ‘Battlestar’ was that it was basically ‘Star Wars’ but once a week, as opposed to waiting for three years for the movie to come out. I was a huge ‘Battlestar’ fan.
Every movie I do, regardless of how they fare at the box office, excites me.
You know, it was a small, independent movie and with Paramount becoming involved, it was obviously a good thing, but you can’t put a round peg in a square hole.
What’s it like finding out Denzel Washington wants you to direct his next movie? It’s like getting a phone call from Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan saying they want you to coach them.
I have more pet peeves than anybody: people talking in the movie theater, people eating in the movie theater loudly, people being rude, people making noise when you’re supposed to be asleep, like drilling noises outside. I could be here all day.
I like dark humor. My favorite movie of all time is ‘Harold and Maude.’
If I ever get looks on the street, which, for the record, is almost never, it’s rarely because they think I’m someone they saw in a movie. More often someone sees me and thinks, ‘Hey, was that guy my waiter the other night?’
Every now and then you get a nice Jewish kid who likes black people and they would come in, and it would be a stream of them, and have black friends and really feel the black struggle on the acting tip and it’s a reason why all of us are not dying in the movie.
What I love about movies is, no matter how many people are involved or how complicated the process is, at the end of the day, it’s just what’s inside of that frame. It’s going to be people sitting in a movie theater watching one shot at a time. And that’s my focus.
I worked at a movie theater in Tempe, Arizona, when I went to community college there. And I got fired because a sorority had rented out a theater to watch ‘Titanic,’ and they were being really rude to me while they were waiting for the movie. So as I tore their tickets, I told them the end of the movie.
Uh, I do not wear a wig in ‘Star Trek’ like I did in ‘Bottle Shock,’ thank God. ‘Bottle Shock’ will be the last wig movie I ever do.
I was a cartoonist when I was at university, but I decided to go into movie making knowing that I could still draw by doing movies, design work, story boards, and such.
I wanted to make people feel the same way I feel when I see a good movie.
I think my performance in ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ was powerful. I was so unafraid and confident. You know, it was the first mother of black Hollywood. I was Tina Turner’s mama. That’s what started it all. I had fallen in love right before that movie, and I had absolutely no fear in me.
A superhero movie is only as great as its villains.
I mean, the whole idea of movies was it was special to go to see – you went to a movie theater to see something that was magical and amazing, in a very special location.
If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.
I like something simple and traditional, like dinner and a movie. The best way to get to know someone is to have a conversation over dinner. And steak houses have a nice atmosphere – the lights are dim, and they usually have a band playing.
‘Avengers’ was a great comic-book movie. ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is a great epic.
Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts of Stone Mountain, Georgia, was the darkest! I mean, he could’ve been a movie villain, he was so intense! He also had the hardest finishing move of all time, the DDT.
I would seriously love to do a Malayalam movie.
I’m a huge David Fincher fan, and to me, ‘Zodiac’ is a masterpiece. I re-watch that movie all the time.
David Lynch and I almost made a movie together in the late ’80s. We had lots of dinners and lunches. He’s a very cool, hip guy. This film, let’s face it, is like an homage to him, I would imagine he’d find it funny.
For me, one of the most perfect times to watch a horror movie is when it’s cold and raining outside and there’s pretty much no outdoor activity to be done. It kind of sets the mood.
A viewer’s imagination is a powerful storyteller, and can often come up with things way more frightening than what you can explicitly show in a horror movie… try to engage that imagination, and the results can be magical.
‘Kung Fu’ was never cancelled; I just left. I decided I had enough of it, and I thought I should do a movie right away, because I think when you leave a television series, it’s important that you establish the fact that you’re a movie actor really quickly, or you might never get that chance.
I think my favorite movie I watched with my dad would be ‘A Knight’s Tale’ with Heath Ledger.
I think I probably think about myself as an actor, which is the way most people do. I think I’m good, I don’t think I’m great. I think I would hire somebody else to play me in the movie about me.
To shoot a movie that takes place in three decades in 30 days is a lot on the hair and make-up team.
That’s the thing with all of us music geeks – music is the soundtrack to the things that happen in our lives, and there’s music that’s unique to that movie.
One of the biggest challenges in my job is letting go of the movie once you go home at night, and knowing you can’t do anything to your performance once you’ve laid it on film.
I worshiped Judd Nelson in ‘The Breakfast Club’ growing up. I must’ve seen that movie 100 times.
I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.
As great as Ed is, the wisdom out here is that he can’t carry a movie. They’ll pay him $3 million to be the second banana in Julia Roberts things. But they won’t put up $3 million for an Ed Harris movie.
We have to make movies where we do not think this is for the American market or this is for the Chinese market. We have to make a good movie that anyone would just want to sit down and watch because love, language, culture transcend everything.
It’s more interesting for me as an audience member to see a movie about a loser.
If a movie requires the lead actor to spend a good chunk of his onscreen time talking to himself, and Popeye is unavailable because of contractual disputes, it’s hard to do better than Johnny Depp.
When I was filming ‘The Outsiders,’ my idea of success was getting the next Martin Scorsese movie.
When somebody is making a movie about your life, that’s different. A show is a live performance. Things are going to go wrong. You are going to get away with things. A movie is indelible. A movie is through a microscope.
One of my biggest personal holdings is Rotana. That company has a very dominant force in the Middle East. It has around 45% of all the movie industry and around 75% of all the music.
In 1995, I sold the rights to Harry Bosch to Paramount. They had several screenplays written, but a movie never happened. Harry Bosch went on the shelf, and I had to wait 15 years to get him back.
There’s an audience out there for all these different types of things. Whether it’s comedy, motion-picture drama, family movie or a cool, cutting-edge indie, it’s nice to know that I can span all those different genres.
When you start working on a series, it’s almost too much work. It’s like a movie a week.
I believe that filmmaking – as, probably, is everything – is a game you should play with all your cards, and all your dice, and whatever else you’ve got. So, each time I make a movie, I give it everything I have. I think everyone should, and I think everyone should do everything they do that way.
To me a great sci-fi movie has elements of horror and suspense.
I just felt that you can’t have a character fall in love so madly as they did in the last movie and not finish it off, understand it, get some closure. That’s why the movie is called ‘Quantum of Solace’ – that’s exactly what he’s looking for.
I find it soothing, the thought of a movie theater.
‘La La Land’ is about the city I live in. It’s about the music that I grew up playing; it’s about movies that I grew up watching. Even the big spectacle of the movie feels private to me in that way.
A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing – when words won’t do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern.
You were up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and then you’d ride in a caravan, because we didn’t have big movie trucks or trailers that is the hardware of a movie camp.
I vividly remember segregation – separate schools, sitting in the balcony at the movie theater, being barred from the public swimming pool.
