Jason Reitman Quotes
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If someone else made 'Up in the Air' or 'Thank You For Smoking' or 'Juno,' I would have wanted to rip their head off. I need that same sort of passion for every project I take on.
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It's funny, I can sit through the worst horror film ever made but even a quite good romantic comedy can drive me nuts.
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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.
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My writing voice is very much like 'Thank You for Smoking.' It's a guy's voice. It's very masculine.
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And as a director, you make 1,000 decisions a day, mostly binary decisions: yes or no, this one or that one, the red one or the blue one, faster or slower. And it's the culmination of those decisions that define the tone of the film and whether or not it moves people.
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Everything I've wanted to turn into a film becomes something new and different when it becomes a movie... Each time I work with an author, I say to them, 'A book and a movie are different things.'
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Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.
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There are only so many movies you can direct. And yet there are movies that I want to make sure make it to the screen in as honest a way as possible.
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Things like Facebook have made you feel as though you're connected to everybody. You've got a thousand friends on Facebook, but you don't actually talk to anybody. You're not close to anybody.
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I've been very, very lucky in my career, in my life - from day one. When aspiring directors say, 'What's your advice?' first I say, 'Be born the son of a famous director. It's invaluable.'
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I don't want to make films that give you the answer. If there is a message to my films - and I hope there isn't - it's to be open-minded.
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I think, through comedy, sometimes we're allowed to discuss things that you'd never be able to talk about in a drama.
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And I certainly like being on a plane, next to a stranger, having conversations that you'd never otherwise have. You're unplugged, your phone doesn't work, you're not online.
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And the biggest improvement I see between 'Up in the Air' and 'Juno' and 'Thank You for Smoking' is that 'Up in the Air' deals with the complicated human stuff in a way that my other films have not. It's a more articulated film, and because of that, I'm most proud of it.
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Comedy and horror are cousins; they're related. They both come from storytellers who want to specifically affect the audience and elicit specific reactions during the movie.
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When characters change on screen, it makes you feel better about yourself. You think, 'Oh I change too, I'm constantly becoming a better person.'
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'Juno' really changed things for me and I get a lot of screenplays come in now, but I like to self-generate and I like to kind of pursue my own ideas. And I think the more personal the better.
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People want to know if I have a moral standpoint that they should be picking up on, and the truth is, I don't. I don't want people to think that I'm trying to tell them to feel a certain way. I think that's cheap filmmaking.
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I find nice people kind of boring.
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When you're young, you want to make every kind of film: musicals, Westerns, horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small, personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters.
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I don't know why I'm drawn to anti-heroes, but I certainly am.
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When you make a movie, you do it so piecemeal. You're doing it, not only scene by scene, out of order, but shot by shot, line by line. And there's this idea that the director has the whole thing in his or her head and they're going to somehow weave it all together in the end.
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I hear the way people talk about the children of famous people. They're not treated very well. The presumptions are usually quite awful. So I tried to establish myself with a couple of movies. After 'Juno' I thought: 'I think I've defined myself enough as my own director that I'd love to work with my father.'
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I'm not Michael Moore. I think Michael Moore wants to tell you how to think. He wants to give you answers. I make movies to raise my own personal questions and not to give answers.