Television and movies were our biggest teachers. When we came to the United States, the Vietnam War was just ratcheting up. And so the Asian faces that I saw on the news, they were the face of the enemy. Asian men, particularly, were either small, ineffective, or they were evil. And those messages were deeply, deeply embedded in me for many years.
If a violent act towards a woman takes place, and the inspiration for that act is violence in cinema, the inspiration for that act would have come from somewhere else if movies didn't exist.
I loved movies, growing up. They brought me so much joy.
Movies are something people see all over the world because there is a certain need for it.
I make movies in order to make things understood, not to be shocking.
One of the problems I have with a lot of movies these days is that everything is too well lit. In the world of digital creations there is a tendency to show too much.
My movies continue to be found and be sold because there's something going on in them.
I just like the continue doing what I've been doing. A melange of funny, straight drama, television, movies, a little theater here and there wouldn't hurt. So if I can keep doing that, I'll be a very happy person.
Frankly, I got into the movies because I like the movies a lot.
I think these movies are as much for people of that time as for people who weren't born. For people who weren't born, they see how leaders must act under a crisis situation, not trying to be re-elected or not trying to check polls, that they go from their gut check.
My god-father, Bob Wall, was in a couple of Bruce Lee movies, and he trained Bruce Lee when he came to America.
But it's true, it's nothing new that decisions about what movies are to be made, and how they're to be made, and who's to be hired to do what, and whether you hire somebody to do their job, or whether you hire somebody to fill a position and you tell them what to do.
'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced.
All my movies got screwed up because of my personality.
To this day, I like the version of movies that don't have the curse words. I'm very reserved that way.
And you also have to do movies that are about commerce because that's what is required of the industry today.
Right now, more people enjoy movies, music, television and movies than they do video games.
I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.
I wanna be in action movies, I wanna be the tough guy... I wanna scare people.
I don't think we're living in great times for movies, to tell you the truth.
The interesting thing about movies, it's not always - y'know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.
I really like going to see movies. I know that's super boring but it's true!
I didn't read comic books; that's not something that was really available to me as a child. We watched more cartoons and movies.
With all due respect to the people who made the motorcycle movies during the '60s, I felt the sophistication level could be a bit higher, and I felt I could raise the bar on that, too.
I think there's a fundamental distinction between character-driven movies that are just really lovely slice-of-life movies and character-driven movies that you remember 20 or 30 years later; the common denominator with the ones you remember is that they all have some really complicated emotional problem at their core.
In the theater, it's a visceral and physical response because you move around so much. You have to do something physical to pull you in. On TV or in movies, everything is so small. You can just lock into a character and ease yourself into that way.
There was supposedly no point showing 'Nightbreed' to critics because the people who see these movies don't read reviews, in brackets, even if they can read at all! Immediately it was disqualified from serious criticism. Therefore, it had to be sold to the lowest common denominator.
My choices in projects have all been character or role-based, and on a financial level, it's obvious: as an actor on a TV series, I get a wonderful paycheck, and a consistent paycheck, which doesn't always happen when you're doing theater or movies.
You just realize that at the beginning of 'Scooby' you're just going to start at level ten and stay at ten the entire time. It's hard. It physically beats you up. It's definitely one of the hardest movies you can do.
I think people who live in the worlds that movies are based on end up disliking them. Unless they're from a different time and era.
The tension I feel is the moment they say, 'Action!' Movies are like lightning in a bottle, and you always want to find when you possibly can catch a surprising moment.
I have grown up watching Bollywood movies, and I would love to act in them.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it - I didn't know enough to know it was really gonna be hard.
I did three movies in a row, and that was horrible. It was a horrible experience for me.
If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.
De Niro was a hero of mine. And Sean Penn. But I've realized I can't operate at that level of intensity. That's okay for movies. On TV, when you live with horror day in and day out, you have to protect yourself.
