Quotes from James Gunn

My girlfriend says I have frontal-lobe epilepsy. I have visions. They have slowed down as I've gotten older, but I still have them.

When I write a screenplay - and I think it's one of the reasons why it was frustrating for me just to be a screenwriter - I'm not thinking of it in terms of words on a page; I'm thinking in terms of visual images - basically, a comic book. I'm thinking of it in a series of shots.

I wrote a 20-page document, before I was ever hired, on exactly how the visuals of 'Guardians of the Galaxy' would be approached, how we'd look at creating a new type of space epic. That's exactly what the movie is today - absolutely everybody has adhered to that original document.

For the theatrical experience to survive, spectacle films need to expand their definition of what they can be. They need to be unique and true voices of the filmmakers behind them. They can't just be copying what came before them.

I would never want to take on a sequel of someone else's stuff unless I was totally reinventing it.

I love shooting movies. I love the shots. That's the thing that I love doing, and I've just never been able to do it.

In a way, metafiction breaks down the story and makes it less real. But in another respect, by that very breaking down, it actually makes things feel more real than they would to begin with.

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.

I guess I am an optimist in a pessimist brain, if that makes any sense. I believe in the innate goodness of most people in this world, and yet I'm a damaged soul like many other people and have my own demons and things I struggle with.

I am loath to suggest 'Visitor Q' to anyone, because you've got to have a warped brain to even understand or appreciate it a little bit. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have been blessed with a warped brain, and I really dug it.

I love 'Empire' - it's my favorite of the 'Star Wars' series.

I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I got to direct a movie involving three of my favorite things in the world: space operas, Marvel superheroes and raccoons.

God giving man life and taking it away is not nearly so bad as God taking away childhood and giving him life.

[T]he one indispensable ingredient of science fiction [is] a belief in a world being changed by man's intellect, a conviction that what was being written could really happen.

I'm a huge Howard the Duck fan. For people who don't know, I'm a huge Marvel Comics fan, but Howard the Duck was maybe my favorite character as a kid. I went back, and I collected all of those comics. I had every comic he was ever in.

Science fiction literature's focus is on ideas, the concept of change, and the impact on humanity. Those concepts are hard to capture on film. They work better in the mind.

Science fiction always has had strains of pessimism and optimism weaving through its historical development, sometimes one dominating and then the other, usually depending on the state of the world.

I know, people have had different things to say about Marvel, about how creatively free they are or not free they are, but for me, the rule has always just been stay as good as I can possibly be, and stay one step ahead of the curve, and stay unique, and stay myself. And they seem to like that.

For me, I'm always hard on myself no matter what, so that's always a thing I have to deal with on a daily basis.

I am not into this old-school way of doing things, where you kill characters, and you bring them back, and then you kill them again, and then you bring them back, and their deaths mean nothing.

I don't see a big difference between the job of directing a low-budget movie and the job of directing a big-budget movie.

'Belko Experiment' was the harshest, most extreme movie I ever made. But I still think there's a very cohesive center to it that wasn't always in my early films. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I think it's a commercial thing.

When you're on an independent film, you have a lot of great people there who are telling really true and authentic stories. But you also have a lot of con artists and people who think they can do something that they can't.

Maybe it's the feminine side of me, but I like that AM radio pop.