Quotes About Movie-making

The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or a bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.

I know it looks like Burt walks through his movies, but he doesn't; he works hard to make it look that way, and the work is tough.

I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.

It's difficult to find a movie that feels true to itself. You feel the hand of Hollywood, the moviemaking by committee, on everything.

Craftsmanship and logic is key to any movie-making.

Let's be honest, working in stop motion is awful. It's the worst. It's such a stupid way to make a movie. It's ridiculous. You're literally playing around with these dolls that are maybe 9 inches tall, trying to coax a performance out of it.

The Braintrust's recipe is fairly simple: a group of directors and storytellers watches an early run of the movie together, eats lunch together, and then provides feedback to the director about what they think worked and what did not. But the recipe's key ingredient is candor. And candor, though simple, is never easy.

That's the most important thing to me - that if I'm gonna spend however long it takes to make a movie, give up 14 hours a day for however many weeks or months, then it's very important for me to know that I'm working with people who I respect and enjoy and that we're going for something together.

If I wasn't making a movie, I was trying to master a new musical instrument or trying to teach myself how to shave with a straight razor. I had to find the weirdest things just to increase my understanding of other cultures or other arts or intellectual pursuits.

I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.

The accomplishment that I am most proud of is that 'Free Willy' and 'Dave' got a political message out, which isn't easy to do within the constraints of studio moviemaking.

We mystify the art of moviemaking, but it's not amystical science. You take a good screenplay, put a group togetherand you hammer it out.

I think each movie-making process is a very exhausting and satisfying and fulfilling experience for me.

When I did 'Mimic,' it was such a difficult experience to try to make. Believe it or not, I did try to make a really adult giant bug movie. And then, in the course of the process, it kind of died a horrible death and gave birth to the movie that exists now, which now, in retrospect, I like. But it's not the movie I set out to do.

I love movies. I can't participate in my love of movie-making fully unless I'm producing it.

More often than not, the experience of shooting the movie has been disappointing and the end product has been a mere shadow of what I hoped it would be. But immersing myself in the story - that's what I like best of all.

No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.

As a studio executive, I took the approach that people are competent until proven otherwise. But when you make a movie, because there is so little time to fix things when they break, you have to almost come to it with the mindset that everyone is incompetent until proven otherwise.

You just realize that at the beginning of 'Scooby' you're just going to start at level ten and stay at ten the entire time. It's hard. It physically beats you up. It's definitely one of the hardest movies you can do.

I think each movie-making process is a very exhausting and satisfying and fulfilling experience for me.

It's weird because movie-making, and especially movie theaters, have always been so old-school, and it wasn't until 3-D that a lot of them were forced to have digital projectors and even digital distribution.

I like the detail work of telling a story in small pieces, as is done in movie-making, and also the long leap of faith needed to see a theatre performance through each night. Both require focus and self-discipline.

Movie-making is serious business. The director and the crew are already under a lot of pressure to give their best to the audience. Therefore, the best part for me as an actor is to act well in the movies and make a jolly atmosphere with the co-stars on the sets.

Every movie that I do, if you analyze the stories, you can notice that in each story, that within the movie after the first 15 minutes, it could fall apart. Or every 10 minutes it has the chance that you lose the thread. On the other hand, if you succeed in putting them together, then the movie looks spontaneous and more like cinema.