With 'Black Rain,' I spent a lot of time with homicide detectives, and I spent a lot of time with different brokers on 'Wall Street.' It helps get the rhythm of the piece and the tone, and how overplayed or underplayed it might be. That's also the magic of movies: You get to hang out and live these different lives.
People predicted in the 1910s that live theater was going to be all gone and that we'd just be watching movies. No, live theater is still around, because it does things that are specific to it.
People have perhaps gotten to the point where for the most part movies are a just bit of escape.
The guy that made me wanna make movies... and this is off the wall-is a guy named Michael Pal, the British director.
I'm like, 'What world am I living in?' Aren't movies made to have something to say? Why make a movie if you don't have something to say? What are you doing it for? Are you doing it because you want to make a lot of money?
I don't know what has happened to movies, but lately every movie is at least 20 minutes too long. It used to be that if you were three hours long it was because it was epic - a movie about Gandhi; something with very important subject matters.
There's an electrical thing about movies.
The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.
I suppose I was formed by too many movies and too much television. At some point I absorbed the dramatic formula.
I am not a cult director at all. I make Hollywood movies.
I think that my vampires in general were influenced by my being allowed to watch the Hammer vampire films. Vampire Circus, also shown as Circus of Fear, was one of those movies.
I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.
I was always cutting dialogue out when we were rehearsing, and when I produced movies, too. I felt that people don't say things in life - they act, they do things. I always wanted my characters doing, rather than saying what they were doing - which was redundant.
I started doing my own animated movies when I was in ninth grade; that's when I got the filmmaking bug. When I was about 16, I started writing jokes for doing stand up, and then I was 19 and started doing stand up.
I really like children to watch my movies.
I lost agents and managers because I turned down big movies that were smutty.
Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.
Spike optioned my first book, 'Now the Hell Will Start,' and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dialogue. His feedback taught me so much about how to craft a cinematic narrative.
It often strikes me that the actors in high school movies look too old.
I started as a journalist for magazines in New York City, so it was always storytelling. And moving into movies was a natural transition.
I've made over 20 movies, and 5 of them are good.
Being alone is scarier than any boogey man and the reason why I don't choose to see Horror movies as a rule.
I understand it all. I can write my own ticket for one or two movies. But if they're not the right ones, my ticket gets yanked. I understand that's how it works, and I'm okay with it.
I know doing movies is where I need to be. That's where my audience wants to see me.
A man becomes what he dreams. And I dreamed of being in the movies. I was brought up on Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, and Cary Grant.
I mean, I didn't have a huge upbringing with movies, I guess.
I had done a bunch of stuff before I even went to Disney. I'm so grateful for what Disney gave me and the experiences that I got, but at the end of the day, I can do so much more than what I did on that channel and in those movies.
As most actors/actresses, I don't like to watch my own movies, either, and I never look at the dailys while filming.
I don't make movies to make a point; I make movies to tell stories about people.
I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a reputation of being an action guy. That's something I probably try to avoid, but I seem to keep making action movies.
For the most part, Hollywood is very transactional. People want to make movies and television shows.
When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe.
I make movies for grownups. When Hollywood starts making them again, I'll start acting in them again.
A lot of my movies were completely destroyed by the censors, who can be pretty arbitrary. They're not completely fair with how they treat one person vs. another.
I don't write plays for them to be turned into movies.
I remember actually going to see the first 'Avengers' with one of my best mates from home. I'd never have dreamed that I'd be in one of these movies, let alone playing Spider-Man.
