The power of the human spirit inspires me. Movies, books, stories, people, anything that reminds us that we are more than just this physical body and our capacity for love and courage can bend reality.
‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ Big, big, big smash for me. My birth of the love of cinema was born with ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘2001.’ Those sci-fi movies I saw when I was a little kid.
When Ginger Rogers danced with Astaire, it was the only time in the movies when you looked at the man, not the woman.
I grew up with the movies of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and Judy Garland – these are the kinds of shows and the kinds of numbers in shows that I dreamed of being in and doing when I was a kid.
Somebody asked me about the current choice we’re being given in the presidential election. I said, Well, it’s like two of the scariest movies I can imagine.
I am a big fan of movies that don’t take themselves too seriously. You know you won’t change the world, but have fun. Movies like ‘Butch Cassidy’ I enjoyed tremendously, but it didn’t alter my opinion of the world.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
One of my favorite things about doing movies is that you get to do different things you’d never do in real life.
When you’re pitching movies, sometimes you know what the idea is, but you fully don’t know the dimensions of it.
Sometimes over things that I did, movies that didn’t turn out very well – you go, ‘Why did you do that?’ But in the end, I can’t regret them because I met amazing people. There was always something that was worth it.
When I finally got up to Industrial Light And Magic to work on the ‘Star Wars’ movies as a model-maker, it felt like dying and going to heaven.
I’m an actor so I’ve been pursuing movies and I have some TV series ideas to pitch too.
The Shining’ is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.
If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.
There’s nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.
I tend to detach myself from movies once I’m done shooting them, because after that, it’s in the hands of God. And it doesn’t help if I panic.
The way I love monsters is a Mexican way of loving monsters, which is that I am not judgmental. The Anglo way of seeing things is that monsters are exceptional and bad, and people are good. But in my movies, creatures are taken for granted.
It’s like, once you’ve seen Tom Hanks win the Golden Globes, the Oscars, you’ve seen his wife, what kind of car he drives, when you watch his movies, you can’t fully get really lost in them.
I love the idea of thinking of cinema as not that far from music. A lot of my favourite movie makers, the way they move their cameras or the way they cut just feel very musical – even if the movies have no music in them at all.
I’ve done a lot of bad TV and bad movies. I’ve also done some really great things.
Technically, maybe I learned most of all from George Stevens, and among his movies I learned the most from ‘A Place in the Sun.’ It’s a lesson in moviemaking.
The movies I watch and the music I listen to and the books I read – those are important to me. It’s very important to me, and I don’t know what I would do without those things.
I washed dishes so I could make movies. it was never a way for me to make money.
Oh yeah, I grew up with comics. You know, I always like to describe myself as a ‘narrative junkie.’ I love novels, I love comics, movies, TV. If it’s a good story, I’m hooked.
Making movies was a real weird kind of adult experience. In a way it was like MIT, in that it was a great education. The big lesson is, people are people. They’re smart, funny, creative people, but they’re people.
