Jason Reitman Quotes

All the airports kind of feel and look the same now. Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you're going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You're going to get your coffee and the 'USA Today' or 'New York Times' in every airport.

Jason Reitman

• Today
• Beautiful
• Coffee

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Quotes to Explore

• Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Character

• I've always had an underdog perspective.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Perspective

• I think romance is a tool, comedy is a tool and drama is a tool. I really just want to tell stories that challenge the viewer, move people, make you laugh, perhaps push an idea about being open-minded but never settle on a genre or an opinion. I hate genre. I like movies that are original in their approach.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • People
  • Hate
  • Comedy

• Being the son of a filmmaker, you are aware of a career as a director. You don't think of it as just movies, but as a life.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Life
  • Career
  • Son

• I laugh a lot in horror films. If I'm scared in a horror film, I try to think about what's scaring me... particularly, if it's a bad movie, but something they're doing still works. It's the same way I look at comedy. I've always had an intellectual view of comedy, and what makes people laugh, and how does it work.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • People
  • Work
  • Bad

• Humanizing good people is kind of boring and I don't really see the value in it... humanizing tricky characters is exhilarating, and making audience films out of indie subjects excites me.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • People
  • Good
  • Value

• I want my audiences to be as open-minded as my characters.

  

  Jason Reitman

• And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.

  

  Jason Reitman

• I really enjoy theater. I just went to see 'Death of a Salesman,' and it knocked me on my ass.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Death

• I'm a kind of private guy.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Guy

• I remember when I was like 19 years old and I started a desk calendar company to pay for my first short film, just so I could say one day that my daddy didn't pay for my first short film. And I really established myself in the film festival world.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • World
  • Remember

• Growing up the son of a director has made me very aware of the various turns that a directing career can take. Sometimes your films turn out exactly as you want. Sometimes they don't. I spent a lot of my childhood on sets. I think as a joke, my father gave me a line of dialogue in each of his films during the worst moments of my puberty.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Up
  • Father
  • Career

• When I look at 'Napoleon Dynamite's style I'm reminded of how I spoke when I was an eight-year-old boy. It was just like capturing the essence of, 'Duh!' It was just like the stuff that I would say when I was like eight, nine, ten years old.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Style
  • Boy
  • Napoleon

• I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Great
  • Bad
  • Career

• I'd done table reads for my own screenplays, and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater, where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts, but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Life
  • Different
  • Live

• I'm trying to figure myself out through my movies. Whether it's big stuff like what we're doing here, or little stuff like, 'Why aren't I happier?' With every film I feel like I'm apologising for something. I feel I'm most successful when I'm looking for something that embarrasses me about my character that I'd like to expose.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Trying
  • Why
  • Character

• Growing up sucks, doesn't it? I understand why people wouldn't want to get old - but it'd be one thing if we became a culture obsessed with eating right, doing yoga, going to therapy and becoming at one with ourselves. That be great. But we don't do that. We seem to be obsessed with all the wrong ways to stay young.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • People
  • Up
  • Great

• What I do feel is that 'Up in the Air' is the most indicative film of 2009. It is the portrait of 2009.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Up
  • Air

• 'Alien' asked ground-breaking questions about eco-politics and female empowerment. 'The Matrix' delved deeper into the concept of perception versus reality than perhaps any other film I know. But for some reason, we tend not to remember the significance of their writing.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Writing
  • Remember
  • Reality

• Can you design a Rorschach test that's going to make everyone feel something every time - and that looks like a Rorschach test? It's easy to show a picture of a kitten or a car accident. The question is, how abstract can you get and still get the audience to feel something when they don't know what's happening to them?

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Time
  • Question
  • Car

• Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Art
  • Comedy
  • Drama

• 'Looper' is about what your 55-year-old self would tell your 25-year-old self over a cup of coffee. It's about finding love in the third act of your life. It's about overcoming trauma and the idea of true sacrifice.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Life
  • True
  • Sacrifice

• My high-school years were so mediocre - I moved out when I was 16 and started living with my girlfriend who was 10 years older. Apart from that, I was just a video nerd.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • School
  • High
  • Girlfriend

• I think it's a mistake for young filmmakers to just buy digital equipment and shoot a feature. Make short films first, make your mistakes and learn from them.

  

  Jason Reitman
  • Mistake