Quotes from Gary Ross

Any director, if you really ask them, will tell you that the toughest thing to do is like a dinner table or a dialogue scene, because you need to keep that electricity maintained throughout the course of the film.

I have some favorites. I love Chaplin; I mean I really love Chaplin. I just think there's a grace and an elegance that's almost never been matched.

I think the CG is an instrument to create reality. I don't think it's an instrument to create a heightened reality.

If there's a 13- or 14-year old kid who is yearning for something beyond the social forces in his own world, in his own neighborhood, the library is the only place where he can go to find that. It was exciting and thrilling to me all the time I worked in the library. It's such a force for social good and it can do so much.

I tend to love actors. I was trained as an actor first so I'm drawn to actors.

Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, 'The Tale of Desperaux', and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.

Horseracing already has the highest mortality rate of any sport in the world per capita to the people who do it. If you crash in Nascar you still have a roll bar, and a cage, and a lot of protection. It's built to crash, but if you fall off a racehorse we all know what can happen, so it's tremendously dangerous.

I wasn't going to make a slick, glossy over-produced piece of entertainment because then I would be doing what the Capitol did. Then I'm actually putting on the Hunger Games and not making a movie of the 'Hunger Games.'

'Harry Potter' created a generation of readers in an era when kids could have disappeared into the depths of the Internet. That's no small feat. Every book series owes J.K. Rowling a debt of gratitude.

Why is every great children's story about a journey? Maybe that's because we are always on one.

'Dr. Strangelove' was and is one of my favorite movies ever, and I just can't believe they actually blew up the world after that.

History is full of examples of people who clamp down after they began to enjoy too much freedom. Freedom can lead to instability, anarchy, and confusion. So there can be a moral counter-revolution.

If you look at the opening of 'Private Ryan ' you are so in the point of view of those guys and there is a whole world swirling all around them. You are learning that geography as they are learning it.

Ultimately, so much Dr. Seuss is about empowerment. He invites us to disappear into our imagination and then blows the doors off what that can mean.

Obviously I love 'The Godfather' movies. I think they're phenomenal.

Family entertainment is really very necessary in our culture. Look how profitable they are. It's almost not discretionary. You need to take your family to the movies.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.

You can't tell your kids to read if you're just watching television. They have to see you read. And in that respect, I think it's important to walk the walk. It's a wonderful shared time.

Most modern science fiction went to school on 'Dune.' Even 'Harry Potter' with its 'boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny' shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion.

I don't understand people who dream in black and white. I just don't get it. My dreams have always been vivid color.

I love all the old classic Disney movies. 'Pinocchio.' There are obviously tons of them that anybody growing up on that stuff takes with them their whole lives, and I'm an admirer of a lot of classic animation and fairy tales. I grew up on a book of Grimm's fairy tales that I kind of wore out again and again. That's all stuff that lingers with you.

I think movies do play a valuable role in turning people on to the act of reading. I think that phenomenon just creates readers. At first they're going to love 'Harry Potter ' or they may love 'The Hunger Games ' but after that, they're going to love the act of reading and wonder, 'What else can I read?'

In a complex and troubling world, who wouldn't want to simplify? Everybody does. Everybody wants to simplify and put up a picket fence.

There are not many people on Team Gary. Actually, it's two people. My kids.