Jonathan Levine Quotes
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Any time I hear certain songs I put in a movie, I have to not listen to them anymore because I associate them with that movie. They take on that association rather than the association I had when I first heard them. So it's kinda bittersweet to put a song in a movie, honestly.
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I think that's the great thing about zombies, is, you know, going back to even 'Night of the Living Dead,' they've always been a tool for kind of holding up a mirror to us and showing us something about ourselves that we might not otherwise know.
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On '50/50,' even though it was 8 million dollars, it was all acting-intensive.
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I really like it when movies take a song and use it to counterpoint a scene.
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I really don't like when you see improv scenes go on too long. It really bothers me, even if the jokes are good.
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I learned some big lessons on my first film, a horror film which was never released in the U.S., even though we sold it to Harvey Weinstein for a lot of money.
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As I continue to evolve as a filmmaker, I'm going to continue to do different stuff.
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Right after 'The Wackness' came out, it was a really exciting time, and then it was a bit disappointing when it came out. Even though not that many people saw it, I was still getting offered some movies. I was thinking that people would just stop calling me since it didn't do very well at the box office.
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If you know how to shoot a scene, then you know how to shoot an action scene. If you've seen an action movie, and you watched it, and you paid attention to how scenes are constructed and where the camera is and how the camera moves, then you know how to do it.
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Genre is a really great shorthand you can have with an audience. In the same way you can use music to create a connection with an audience, it brings so much of their knowledge of what genre really is to the table. You have a shortcut to connect with them. I really like that.
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I don't often watch something I've done on TV. Usually, I'll change the channel and watch something else.
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That's the great thing about being a director. You have your list of things you have to worry about and things you don't have to worry about. If you can hire someone or cast someone who equates to not having to worry about, it's great!
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I've had a couple of family members deal with cancer, and I remember that moment where they're going into surgery, and you just have no idea what's going to happen, and it's really scary.
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I think people will always want to go see a movie, whether it's a comedy and you want to see it and laugh with people, or whatever.
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As a director, your expectation and reality don't always match up, and I think that that's... I think it's a little jarring.
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I think it's cyclical. Zombies have been around for ages, and vampires have run their course; we've had so many vampire movies.
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For whatever reason, the films I gravitate towards do have these strange sort of tonal balances to them... I kind of realized on '50/ 50' why I liked these blending of tones, because I think it's kind of what life is like: funny one minute, sad the next, scary the next.
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The way 'Coming Home' uses music in general is incredible, but the final song that really kind of crescendos all of the emotion that the whole movie has kind of been building to is this song called 'Once I Was' by Tim Buckley.
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I think I'm always conscious of not letting things fit into a specific box. Being a filmmaker and trying to chart a career, you never want anyone to be able to pigeonhole you into one specific thing.
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Zombies have always had a lot of built-in social commentary.
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I have about 100 gigs of music, and I'm always going through thinking about what song I can match to a scene and all that.
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Usually, the kills are almost Wile E. Coyote kind of things in horror movies.
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For me, it's always more interesting to look at things when you don't really have a horse in the race, so to speak.
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I love subverting expectations or playing with the sort of unspoken kind of connections that the audience has.