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Most actors that I work with are wonderful. Jodie Foster or Tom Hanks will make anything work.
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I think the only thing filmmakers can do is try to make good movies and make them as long as they allow us to keep making them. But at the end of the day, it is a business, and if audiences don't care, there's nothing we can do. It'll just go away, I guess.
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'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' and 'Used Cars' were absolute failures at the box office. Complete disasters. I learned some sad news: it's not an automatic thing that, if you make a good movie, everyone wants to see it.
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Because movies have gotten so expensive, and they're so expensive to market, that means that for a movie to break even or to make its money back, everybody has to go see the movie, and if everybody has to go see the movie, then it can't be about anything.
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Working with actors who are directors is magnificent. Because they understand the art form intimately, and they know exactly how everything works.
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No one can actually define love, but you attempt to, and the closest you can get is longing. And that itself has a melancholy to it. You can say dread, or doom - it's that feeling we all feel when we fall in love with someone: we have this horrible, fearful feeling that maybe we will never have that person in our life.
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I could never be like Hitchcock and do only one kind of movie. Anything that's good is worthwhile.
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I grew up on Chicago's South Side in a working-poor family, so I watched everything on television. It was like my window on the world. But we also went to the movies pretty regularly - mostly on Tuesdays, because that was Ladies Night, and my mom could get in for free.
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I think that technological tools that filmmakers use to tell stories, in a perfect world, need to become invisible. When it's brand new and it's never been seen before and you're birthing this stuff, it's very much on people's minds.
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When I was a kid, I loved action, war, horror, monster movies... Anything with special effects. I was fascinated with how'd they do that.
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I'm in a constant conflict about having to make a movie for the big and the small screen at the same time, stylistically. So I just basically make it for the large screen.
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We don't function well as human beings when we're in isolation.
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I have no complaints about 'The Walk.' I made it, and I'm very happy with what happens.
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It's the most unrealistic thing you can do to shoot a close-up, and it's the most unrealistic place you can be as a performer. And yet actors grouse about having to do visual effect shots, but they love doing close-ups.
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No matter how many obstacles that are thrown in our path, there are ways to except them and to live through them.
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In the next couple of years, part of every film's process is going to be to adjust the images. And it'll be to change the color of an actor's tie or change the little smirky thing he's doing with his mouth. Or you can put in more clouds or move the tree a little bit.
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USC Film School always had a real sense of drama and lineage.
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When they invented the Steadicam, every movie had to have a fight in a stairwell. Whenever there's a new thing, it's abused until artists realize what a Steadicam as a tool can be. And now I defy people to be able to see Steadicam shots, because we know how to do them and make them invisible.
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I can't see any reason why a dramatic story can't be in 3-D. I think 'Lawrence of Arabia' would have been fabulous in 3-D.
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You can't legislate sobriety.
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I'm really tired of making these huge, over-$100 million movies where they literally mean life and death for a studio. It's really rough making these expensive movies. Everyone is hysterical.
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Understand life's mysteries - as mysteries to be lived.
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The thing that makes love stories work, in my opinion, in movies and novels and country & western songs, is the feeling of longing.
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Favorite movie lists are impossible for me to do.