One thing I always heard from the begining when I talked about this being a movie - was that the rule is that animated movies don't work unless they're Disney movies for kids. Unless they're family movies.
And usually the studios they don't want you to have credit for your movies because they want to take credit for the movies because if you get credit for your movies they've got to pay you more.
There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.
Although charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him.
I grew up with action movies in my head.
'Girl, Interrupted' is one of my favorite movies.
What career? A man's got a body of film of about four movies in about 10 years or something. I do it because I think I can do a good job of something and I'll enjoy it, do it, and sort of vanish. I don't want to be an actor for hire.
In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.
I don't want to come and conquer American films or the American market. I just want to do movies that I care about, stories that I like.
I'm a big kid, I'm a kid at heart, so I still love the classic family films, such as the great Warner Bros film 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' - not the remake, but the original. It's still one of the best movies, hands down, ever made, and of course that goes back to the ingenuity of the characters and the storyline.
Growing up, my favorite movies were 'Forrest Gump,' 'Shawshank Redemption,' 'Gladiator' - none of them really had Asian leading men.
The movies I'm in not a lot of people see, but it's alright.
I think we grew up thinking that the funniest things on TV were the old, serious movies. I always liked the Marx Brothers, but the thing that always made us laugh were movies like Zero Hour. That's what inspired us.
Even from a really young age I was a huge movie buff - five, six, seven, eight. Just loved movies, but in a more in-depth way than most kids that loved movies at that time. I'd find a filmmaker or something and want to see all his movies.
To me, the bones of 'Smokin' Aces' is in the Coen brothers. 'Barton Fink' and 'Raising Arizona.' Those two movies, if you look at them, that's where a lot of that comes from.
I have pessimistic moments when I think I should go on a diet because people are paying money to see movies with exceptional-looking actresses. But being in college has helped me realize that the best thing I can do is to feel good about myself and forget about other people's standards.
I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.
I don't make movies because I think audiences will want to go see them.
People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies.
I would like to see a fierce Fantasia mixed with Blade Runner, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars all in one. That's the kind of movies I want to make.
You know when Hollywood does a great big blockbuster that really wraps you up in a world, and lets you believe in extraordinary things that move you in some way, in an almost operatic sensibility? That to me is the most fun I have at the movies.
My siblings and I, we were raised on TV and films. Not a day went by that we weren't watching one of three movies - 'Caddyshack,' 'Animal House,' 'Beverly Hills Cop' - on rotation. Our comedy, our personalities were set watching 'Sesame Street': these really sort of wacky, Jim Henson-y characters.
For every one that gets made, there are five other movies that you try to get made that you don't.
My body looks like 30 but my face looks like 50. But I cannot walk bare-chested in the streets. I like to do these movies to challenge myself physically.
Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.
There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.
I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.
It doesn't matter if a critic pans or praises my movies, I am only concerned about that one audience member and what their experience is.
They do think it is a big summer movie and that's why they want to give it a great chance, but they don't want to go up against Spider-Man 2 or some of the other big movies, the $100 million films that are coming up.
I like cable: you only work four months out of the year and have the other eight months to do movies if you want.
After I was fired from Disney, I did some of the worst movies ever made.
Everything I know about the FBI came from movies! Right? The idea of these kind of uptight, conservative guys whose ties are tied too tight.
The thing that is incredibly helpful is that we screen the movies and we ask the audience if they like it or not and we ask a lot of questions and do testing on the movies. For comedies, at least, it's very helpful. If they're not laughing and they don't say that they loved it, then I have screwed up.
Sinatra, here's a guy who plays a tough guy in all his movies, but was allowed to be vulnerable when he stepped up to the microphone.
It's a great feeling to think that I can be a friend to so many people through my movies.
In my career, my movies tend to polarize critics.
