I wanted to escape Small Town U.S.A. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities.
I'm a single parent, and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the traveling involved in making movies. So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn't miss it.
I often wonder why people remake movies. Is there just a lack of imagination out there that they can't come up with an original idea?
I like horror movies, they're fun. It was the most fun I've had on a movie set.
I was that kind of kid that was going to the movies every weekend, I couldn't get enough of the movies, and now I get to make them. So I kind of have a one-track mind.
There are movies where actors aren't characters but movie stars, being cool beyond belief throughout the whole movie. That is what it is. And we reveal ourselves when we act, very often without noticing. But if I can manage to do a character without showing anything of myself, then that's the ultimate goal for me. No leakage.
It's like those high-school yearbook photos that everyone would rather not see: Oh my God, look at that mullet hair. I have those photos too, but for me, they're, like, entire movies. And they show them on cable.
Fair or not, it always sucks when everyone wanders back from Sundance talking about how bad the movies were.
Hollywood movies are seen throughout the world.
I don't need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.
Well, honestly, the films I personally like to go see are smaller, more character-driven pieces, so that's why the movies I've made have been smaller, more character-driven movies.
I don't really want to do the Hollywood thing. I think you ought to try to say something with your movies.
I really like the half-hour comedy. I really do. I know people that are in movies all the time and they, you know, they don't see their families as much. And that takes its toll over time.
I think sport in general affects what people see in movies. I always try to explain to people in Hollywood that we have to make movies more like sport because, in sport, everything can happen and it's so much better than movies in some ways.
I always knew I wanted to make movies since I was around eleven. I never thought of it as wanting to do straight-up comedy. Even now, I don't see things in terms of genre.
Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.
Social media stars are kind of taking the traditional route, like movies.
I grew up on certain movies, particular movies that said something to me as a kid from Missouri, movies that showed me places I'd yet traveled, or different cultures, or explained something, or said something in a better way than I could ever say. I wanted to find the movies like that.
I haven't done a lot of action movies, so it's kind of fun to get to do a lot of stunt work.
I don't think movies can ever be too intense, but people have to understand why you're showing them the things you are showing them.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
I've always had a thing for old movies, old Hollywood. I've always just loved watching Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo. In all of those old movies from the '40s and '50s, women put themselves together so well, with a little bit of drama and elegance. That was fascinating to me growing up.
When you make movies based on real life, you try to exaggerate it.
As for action movies, I did Tarzan, and I'm also about to shoot Meltdown, which John Carpenter wrote.
Those movies, Decline I and II and Suburbia, are dearly loved, but they never made any money. I didn't even have the rights for some of them.
I thought I understood the story very well, because I've lived with it for so long. But movies change and take on a life of their own once they start to be made, and you have to keep your eye on the real ball, not the ball that's in your head.
I do everything from home. I broadcast commentaries for CBS News Radio every day - from home, on a disk that I mail in. I write a weekly op-ed piece for the 'New York Daily News,' and any books or plays or movies that I'm crazy enough to write, I do that from home.
I go to the movies a lot, and I regret when I see some actor that I used to like, to find them offering no more surprises.
John Barry was my hero when I was about 13. His scores to the James Bond movies were the scores of my life back then.
You know, every country needs another country to mock, and Australians seem to be pretty good at impersonating American people. Maybe it's because all the movies and music and TV you see there is from America, so we just have the knack for it.
I did have an offer to direct one of the Alien movies but I wasn't too excited about all the effects work.
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
A lot of the people that stop you - well, they're not nuts, exactly. They're more like super-fans. They think that I'm some sort of rich guy, that everyone in the movies is making the kind of money Angelina Jolie is making. They don't realize that most of my life has been a struggle.
The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.
I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.
I would rather not know about how one gets parts in movies these days.
