Quotes from Jeff Baena

My pet peeve is when people criticize things when they're just trying to have a conversation.

I always knew I wanted to make movies since I was around eleven. I never thought of it as wanting to do straight-up comedy. Even now, I don't see things in terms of genre.

I grew up in suburbia, so it's a world I'm familiar with... but in my experience, all the families that I grew up thinking were the perfect families who kept it together... all their secrets would come out, and it'd be something dark and disgusting beneath the surface, so I wanted to exploit that.

When you are a writer the assist-to-turnover ratio...there are a lot more turnovers than assists. It's just the nature of the beast.

I like collaborating with actors. I love finding that moment where it all comes together.

I remember when I was in film school. It was my second year, and some kid did - had this really over-religious symbolism; like, it said 'John 3:16' and had angels falling over, and it was just this insane - it wasn't that great.

My first job after graduating was working with Robert Zemeckis. I got a job a week after graduating and moving to L.A. So I got to work on 'What Lies Beneath' and 'Castaway' as a PA, which is basically like a gopher.

I don't know if it's because my sensitivity is through the roof, but I can't stand contrived dialogue anymore.

For me, the whole idea of performance is not being self-aware, and then sort of just experiencing.

I'm just trying to get an exposure and make my day.

I wanted to do something a little bit more feminine after my second movie, 'Joshy,' which was so masculine.

I went to film school; I went to NYU film school.

I am interested in all aspects of filmmaking, so I have an opinion on every aspect, so sound design, score, cinematography, editing - all that stuff I have experience doing myself, so I had a very strong idea of what I wanted, and I got, for the most part, people that were able to articulate that idea, which was nice.

You show a movie to your friends when you're working on it, but you don't have any real objectivity. You just don't know. So that moment when it's shown for the very first time at Sundance, it's just terrifying. I'm so anxious. And then every screening is different.

I've been a writer for years, but it was mainly as a function of trying to be a director, so I just got work as a writer. I want to keep directing.

It's so rare when marketing and press doesn't ruin your movie.

When you are a writer, the assist-to-turnover ratio... there are a lot more turnovers than assists.

I think there are a lot of actors who are excellent at cold reads, and they go to an audition, and they read the part and nail it, but then when it comes to the performance, they don't have something.

When people are committed to things, and the world view they have is no longer in alignment with our world view, then it becomes funny.

I know, when I was in film school, some of my films were silly, but a lot of them were more dramatic. I don't think I intentionally set out to do comedy stuff. I guess that's a consequence of coming up working with David O. Russell and skewing toward those sensibilities.

In Judaism, the temple was the most holy site in the world. But if you extend that argument as a metaphor, and you say 'The world is a holy place,' and you're treating this holy place like a money-lending psycho, then Jesus says, 'This is hypocrisy!' and he'd point it out and flip it over.

In my mind, if you went back to the Middle Ages, in Italy they'd be speaking Middle Age Italian. And at that point, it would obviously be indecipherable for us, but for the people of that time, it was just normal talking.

I was reading a lot of Jacques Derrida at the time, writing 'Beth.' He actually talked about zombies.

If you look at zombie movies throughout history, they're always making adjustments. Even the idea of the virus zombies and the back-from-the-dead zombies... there's been tons of tweaks.