Quotes on Movies

I'm very opinionated about movie musicals when they're adapted from live shows. You'll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone's eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds.

You know, sound was still a fairly new thing when I came into movies. And the reason musicals happened is because of sound. They could put music in the picture! That's how it all began.

While the notion that torture works has been glorified in television shows and movies, the simple truth is this: torture has never been an effective interrogation method.

One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.

As a newcomer to America who learned to 'speak American' by watching movies, I firmly believe that to change the politics of immigration and citizenship, we must change culture - the way we portray undocumented people like me and our role in society.

People go to movies on Saturday to get away from the war in Iraq and taxes and election news and pedophiles online and just go and have some fun. I like doing movies that are fun.

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.

Every time you do something, people are going to like it, people are going to hate it. You tend to make the movies on the basis you are making them for the people who are going to like them and not worrying too much about people who don't like them.

When I was in high school, I felt totally alienated from the world, but I loved movies. They were my escape, but coming from a disadvantaged community, I never knew that filmmaking was an option for me. A program like School of Doc would have been a game-changer.

I was very influenced by movies; I was very influenced by a world that had a sense of dream.

I love movies, but sometimes I think it's better for actresses not to be total cinephiles. You have to be able to do the work at some point; you can't be totally starstruck. 'I can't believe it's Woody Allen!' You have to get past that.

Although I'm not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies made from them, regardless of how well or badly the movie represented the actual written story.

Making movies is both entirely ludicrous and incredibly hard. It's a preposterous way to spend your time. You give up a lot for the privilege of doing it, and one of the things you get are relationships of immense trust that you see forged in situations of immense stress.

Some kids went to the movies for escape. We found it with jazz. This is where we got religion. It was a kind of raw spiritual anarchy.

Film buffs who don't live in Hollywood have a fantasy about what it's like to be a director. Movies and the people who make movies have such glamour associated with them. But the truth is, it's not like that. It's very different. It's hard work.

Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.

The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.

There were so few examples of Asian or Asian-American lead characters on American TV or even in the movies. And the ones that have existed for so long were either stereotypical or offensive in some way, or just not reflective of the lives of people in the community.

Movies and television have a way of using a soundtrack not just to create a mood but to literalize it. You could always count on a master class in splitting the difference between artistry and obviousness during the so-called Blaxploitation era.

Australian genre films were a lot of fun because they were legitimate genre movies. They were real genre films, and they dealt, in a way like the Italians did, with the excess of genre, and that has been an influence on me.

I'm probably only going to make 10 movies, so I'm already planning on what I'm going to do after that. That's why I'm counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre.