I know people watch our movies and they'll see a lot of images - they call it gross-out - that they don't like, and I understand that. It's an important movie and one that's extremely well done, but the amount of violent imagery was not for me.
The history of horror movies goes back a long way... of people trying to convincingly be terrified when looking at a piece of tape on the side of the camera box. I have a whole new respect for it.
I feel I'm all over my movies. I know my movies are all over me.
I don't want to limit myself. I want to keep doing all sorts of roles. I guess what lies behind this urge is the conviction that movies have changed my life. And certain performances have inspired me to try to be someone different.
I just hope, every now and then, the studios still slip one of my movies in.
I do like strong women in my movies. I have five sisters, so I've just grown up with that model.
What's great about making movies is the sort of additive process of bringing people together and having an idea and watching the idea be added to and at the end you have this thing.
I didn't quit movies. They quit me.
Books and movies are never finished, only surrendered.
The movie 'Black Cat,' from 1934, is one of my favorite movies.
I realized this is what God has dealt me, and I should be thankful considering all that's happened to me in my life, but MS caused the movies to stop - stop dead - and I miss it.
Movies these days have made killers into funny people. What's that all about? I've got kids and family and friends, and I don't like bad things. I don't think they're funny, and it's irresponsible to make movies that don't show you how that's not good.
Everybody wants blockbusters. I like to see a few pictures now and then that have to do with people and have relationships, and that's what I want to do films about. I don't want to see these sci-fi movies, and I don't want to do one of those. I don't understand it.
I've been in enough movies to know that when you're on the set and you start shooting, you're looking at playback and you get a sense of what it's going to be like.
Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre.
One of the great things about the 'Iron Man' franchise is that they employ fascinating actors who don't necessarily do action movies. Before 'Iron Man' you didn't associate Robert Downey, Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow with those kinds of films. There's an emphasis on repartee and wit.
You can't think about how people will perceive you or your character. All you can do is focus on your work. The rest is up to the universe. I've been acting for 16 years. I've done 55 movies and, in all seriousness, there's maybe five that are good and the rest are crap.
The reality is, the movies that were most impactful to me growing up, when I decided I wanted to make movies, I was going to see Woody Allen double features with my brother, back when they had double features.
The one thing I try and do, when people say, 'What kind of movies do you guys look for,' the one thing I look for is 'different.' And I think that's very antithetical to Hollywood.
After I was fired from Disney, I did some of the worst movies ever made and I got professionally involved with a manager who said it didn't matter what you did as long as you kept working. I wound up completely broke.
I make about two movies a year outside the 'True Blood' schedule. I work on a great show six months a year, then outside that I get to satisfy whatever creative urges I have. It's a great position, especially for a single guy like me.
When you go to watch a baseball game, when you go to watch an NBA game, when you watch an NFL game, when you go to watch movies, the offering that those arenas are doing foodwise is 'all the hot dogs you can eat'; all the French fries you can eat; for $20 you can eat 20 hot dogs.
I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.
I have a top 10 list of my favorite movies of all time, and just for the sake of not having my top 5 be entirely Miyazaki films, I had to pick one. So, right now, my favorite Miyazaki film is probably 'Princess Mononoke.'
YouTube clips get millions, billions of hits. Reality TV programs have their own channels. How can movies attempt to compete with these kinds of numbers? And do we even need to? Are we scaring ourselves by unnecessary comparisons, by not comparing apples with apples?
When I was starting out, I didn't know what the hell I was doing and my person who was helping me out, I didn't even have an agent, got me five or six big auditions for leads in movies in 1986 that I had no business auditioning for. I think I ran out of three of them before I'd even finished.
I was so young, and making movies, going to the studio every morning at dawn was magic.
Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.
Cinema Paradiso, because it reminds me of why I make movies, the magic of movies, the romance of movies.
When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything.
Making movies is not rocket science. It's about relationships and communication and strangers coming together to see if they can get along harmoniously, productively, and creatively. That's a challenge. When it works, it's fantastic and will lift you up. When it doesn't work, it's almost just as fascinating.
In the America that I grew up in, men of Asia placed last in the hierarchy of manhood. They were invisible in the high-testosterone arenas of politics, big business, and sports. On television and in the movies, they were worse than invisible. They were embarrassing. We were embarrassing.
I majored in Chinese Studies. I'm probably the only director of chicken Indian zombie movies who can speak pretty good Mandarin.
When young people see movies like 'Gandhi 'or 'JFK,' there is an element of romanticization of these powerful people, and young people often feel a huge distance between their own lives and the lives of these social-change heroes. But the Panthers were flawed-up people from the streets, so it's easier to identify with them.
In my view, relationship movies never get old because humanity will never not be confounded by their relationships.
We live in an age when it is cheaper to buy the rights to movies than to make them.
