Quotes from Marc Platt

Stephen Sondheim is calculus for actors. The words are witty and brilliant and profound but complicated.

'A Christmas Carol' and 'It's a Wonderful Life,' are movies we love with magic in them.

I was always interested in storytelling, particularly in theater and film. I liked creative things. My mom and dad are wonderful people, but both are tone deaf, so I don't know where the gene came from.

I saw 'Into the Woods' maybe 26 times in various incarnations. I'm very familiar with it.

The themes and ideas embedded in 'Into the Woods' always spoke to me.

Even in a manuscript form, 'The Girl on the Train' sort of leapt off the pages as a contemporary suspense drama-slash-thriller. It has all the mechanics of a thriller, but at the heart of it was a great character study.

I'm very competitive, and I want to be very successful, but at the end of the day, films to me are still films. I want them to be good, and I'll work the hardest, but at night, I go home to my life and my family, and that's where my heart lies.

When a writer gets a second chance to look back on something, it's a great opportunity to say, 'Hey, this is really good, but we can do it even better.'

With 'Shinobi,' we hope to make a film that honors the essence of the games.

I think too many people in Hollywood perhaps fail to make a distinction between the political side of Israel and the notion of the country. And they can be separate things.

Repression is the enemy of civilization - so keep dreaming, because the dreams we dream today will provide the love, the compassion, and the humanity that will narrate the stories of our lives tomorrow.

I do love being amongst creative people and facilitating that and being inspired by people. I get very bored with just competence and require inspiration all around me.

Good movies beget other good movies. So when a movie captures the imagination and hearts of people around the world, it's going to have a positive influence on similar genres getting made.

It's hard to get an inner dialogue in a film. It's not cinematic. But in a musical, the character can just turn to the audience and sing.

James McAvoy is not an action star.

I'm lucky that I get to do the bigger movies and the smaller movies.

The further you get up the corporate ladder, the farther you get from the actual filmmaking process.

I loved being a film executive. But something was always missing for me. I always had the feeling that I was looking over my shoulder - what's going on on Broadway?

We're all human beings; people make mistakes.

I do remember feeling, 'I don't ever want to feel impotent in terms of what I can control in a business in which you can have very little control.' And that motivated me to go to law school - that, and my parents saying, 'Go to law school before you do anything.'

I appreciate actors who work very hard to get at the truth of the character they're playing. That speaks to me, and I try to protect that process because I value the focus and intention behind it.

Adaptations, especially movie musicals, are really hard to do.

We always love actors taking unexpected turns.

Watching familiar characters take unexpected turns is very appealing.