Jon Favreau Quotes
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I cooked a little bit in my first movie; I did a movie called 'Made.' For the little kid in the movie, I do a scene where I'm preparing a pasta puttanesca. I always loved watching that scene.
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You have an hour and a half or two hours - maybe two and a half hours - in a movie, and it has to be a self-contained three-act structure. It's like a rock and roll song. Certain things have to happen for it to be a toe-tapper and get people excited, leaving the theater.
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I've cut myself out... I've cut scenes out that I was in and that's when you realize that you've got to make the best movie you can.
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I like reading reviews. If they're clearly hating on you, I try not to read that deeply. But if they really are trying to understand, it's interesting.
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I'm a very lazy person by nature. I have to be really engaged, and then I go straight from lazy to obsessive. I couldn't study chemistry, but I could memorize all the books for Dungeons and Dragons. It was ridiculous. The trick is to find what I like to do.
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The ultimate storyteller is Shakespeare, who was able to get the 'groundlings' to laugh at his bawdy humor and storylines but could still be studied by scholars to this day for the complexity of his language, meter, and symbolism. That's the real guy.
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For a movie - any movie - to work, all the bread has to fall jelly side up; everything has to go right. You have to hit the zeitgeist.
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I'm a pretty early adopter of social media. There's a whole subculture to it. I'm smart enough not to tweet things out of emotion.
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I like happy endings in movies. I think life has a happy ending. When it's all said and done, it's all something worthwhile, and I want my movies to reflect that. There are enough things to be sad about. When you pop in a movie, let the message be one that's one of hope.
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People think bigger movies are bad, and that's just not true - there's bad big films, and there's bad little ones. The bad big ones have to make their money back, so they'll push them down your throat, but the little ones just disappear if they're bad.
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When I'm working with improv people, I give them the green light to just bring it and try things.
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For me, I love food. It's my greatest pleasure and also the thing that could ruin you as well. It's one of those things where, if you're not thoughtful about it, it could be unhealthy. But if there's a mindfulness about it; it actually is a wonderful tool of emotional expression.
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Half the people think I write Obama's speeches; the other half think I'm on 'Entourage.' So I'm at the level of fame where people kind of know who I am, but they confuse me with other people.
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I did a guest thing on 'My Name Is Earl,' and there is something about being involved in a TV show that's in the midst of its popularity that frees up the creative process.
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I remember the first script I wrote after 'Swingers' was a Western, and I just couldn't get it made.
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I wanted to be a New York City firefighter. I didn't make it in, though.
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Movies like 'Chef' are not really box-office monsters in the summertime and don't really fit into Hollywood's business model any longer. Even if 'Chef' is successful, it will be successful in the context of what it is. There's a limited upside to a film that's so small, but there's also limited exposure for the people who backed me.
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When you're going for a big studio comedy, the joke tally better be pretty high, and you better have some big comedy set pieces. That was one of the issues when I was trying to get 'Swingers' made for the first time, which is that there weren't any broad comedy set pieces.
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For something to be profitable doesn't necessarily mean it's the best thing in the world for the director. You judge a movie by different standards - I've worked on comedies, and now I've worked on superhero movies, and the reviews are almost parenthetical in both of those genres.
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Thankfully, I have a background as an actor, and you learn how to live in that world of not knowing what's going to happen next.
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I find that people... very few people think that what they're doing is bad, and usually the people who think what they're doing is bad it has more to do with guilt.
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Scorsese's been a hero of mine since I was young. If you saw 'Swingers,' you know I was definitely fixated on his body of work.
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I don't have a lot of patience for movies that aren't cleanly told.
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When Ron Howard does 'Rush,' he has to learn and steep himself in F1 culture and European racing culture, and that's part of the fun of the gig. You learn to learn. Your real skill as a director is being a learner and an observer. You're constantly learning another thing in context.