I don’t think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.
People go to the movies to see things they haven’t seen before. Call me a radical.
Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.
Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything’s okay. I don’t make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything’s not okay.
You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.
My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people’s idea of obsessive.
The thing I always say to any writer that I’m working with is: Just make sure that in any argument, EVERYONE is right. I want every single person arguing a righteous side of the argument. That makes interesting drama.
When you go and you tell a studio and that it’s an ensemble, that doesn’t mean a lot to them. But, my hats off to Paramount and Warner Brothers, because when we told them that these were the kinds of people that we want to get, across the board, they were unbelieveably enthusiastic about it.
I want people to flourish. I want them to walk away from the experience going, “That’s what it should be like.”
People always ask why I don’t make independent movies. I do make independent movies – I just make them at Sony and Paramount.
I don’t know how much movies should entertain. To me I’m always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I’ve never gone swimming in the ocean again.
I’ve never been to Harvard, I’ve never been to college, so I don’t know what dorm life is like.
Look, it’s nice. I like the fact that critics liked this movie, but most of the movies that I’ve made, you’ll find a handful of people that love it and more than a few other handfuls of people hate it. If I was invested in that, I would’ve given up long ago.
You’ll find that the movie business is paid for by those mega movies. The movie business is paid for by Big Macs. By movies as product. Movie studios use that term “product” all the time. Product? You mean you have a lot of stories? No, we have a lot of product. You have stories.
Hire the right people and get the hell out of the way.
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever listened to someone’s commentary. Ever.
I do agree you can’t just make movies three hours long for no apparent reason. For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that’s longer than most marriages.
Human beings are amazing at finding ways to waste their own time.
I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.
It’s a bad day when you don’t get the work done that you need to get done or you don’t get it done to the satisfaction.