Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My first love will always be movies.
I'm not someone who's gone to Comic Con as a devotee.
'Duel' is one of the greatest suspense films of all time.
For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.
I have scripts that I've only shown to animals... and they passed on them.
[Gal Gadot] is really intense and scary and also incredibly warm and sweet.
To me, it's important to try and make an emotional connection with the audience.
One of the dangers of making a movie about young people is it's potentially trite.
I have alopecia. My hair fell out when I was in college and I didn't take it so well.
I specialize in movies that people say are underrated, with the exception of 'Superbad.'
The Holy Grail audience are young people and, at the end of the day, that's who gets courted.
The joke is that no matter how much we think we can evolve, we'll never escape our limitations.
I think I am attracted to that time in life when your worldview is still forming in small ways.
I can't seem to escape comedy. Whenever I sit down and try to write something serious, it just doesn't work.
When I first saw 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High,' I thought: That's what my life is like. That's my day-to-day.
Even the mistakes and the pain that you've caused and enacted upon you. That is definitely what I'm trying to capture
I feel like I'm long overdue for a "one for me" movie, so I've got two low-budget indy personal things I'm working on.
In indies, life is very dark and realistic, and in mainstream films, the edges are all rounded off and very sentimentalized.
I certainly did work at an amusement park. In 1985. Wow - I'm in denial about the year. I was in college, and I had no skills.
Some scenes comes together really quickly, and some scenes are disasters that take forever. But it sort of works itself out over time.
I'm really glad to have made a movie that way on Superbad, because I learned a lot about what can be done and what the limitations are.
I have some pride in the things I've done, but I'm pretty hard on myself. Part of looking at my old work is to motivate me to try harder.
I've been co-writing a TV thing with Bryan Cranston, which we are going to find out soon if it's moving forward or not which is for Amazon.
I'd like to think I have a strange affinity for the embarrassing. Not sure what that says about me. But I like the awkward, uncomfortable comedy.
It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.
Jon Hamm is incredibly good at playing people who have secrets and are hiding aspects of their personality, and obviously Don Draper had a lot of that.
When you're a young person, the solace one can get from popular music is something I just have tremendous nostalgia for, affection for. I still have it.
I feel this way about a lot of movies, that the characters are idealized versions of people. For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.
The first person I met in the business was David Heyman, who was a producer on Daytrippers and who went on to produce the highly-unsuccessful Harry Potter series.
My own personal geek culture years were when I was much younger. I collected comic books up until a certain age. I wanted to be a comic book artist when I was younger.
It's like I'm thin skinned, I guess, but I thought I could never write about my youth for the longest time. It took getting to my forties before I could even look back on it.
The truth is, good actors are always looking to do something different. They are dying to play slightly odder characters or work on movies that aren't straight down the middle.
Jon Hamm was the first I thought of for the other role in [Keeping Up with the Joneses], I recently worked with him on Clear History, an HBO improv movie that we had done together.
Film school didn't prepare me for the fact that you have to manage so many different personalities at every stage, and I learned nothing about what to do when a movie was finished.
The crazy thing about independent filmmaking is that you're so judged on your first film. It almost needs to be one of those groundbreaking 'I've-never-seen-that-before'-type movies.
Brian Eno records and music became a huge obsession of mine in college, in a way that a pop song can provide solace. I don't know if it's shallow or silly, but it meant so much to me.
I kind of thought I would only work exclusively in the world of naturalistic comedy drama, but there is this side of me that also loves Hollywood, and I wanted to see what that felt like.
I don't see that many movies where people are depicting middle-class suburban life in a more textured way. My feelings about the suburbs are not so wonderful, so my movies tend to be a little melancholy.
We didn't want to make it a parody of Don Draper[in Keeping Up With the Joneses] but we did arrive on this idea that there's a side of Jon Hamm that opens up that would like him to stop living as a professional liar.
I am very interested in the small decisions people make that do set you on a different road in your life. As much as we have influence over what kind of person we're going to become, there are little tests along the way.
I feel like I came from a generation where... We didn't have Vietnam. We didn't have World War II. Nothing cultural was thrust upon us to make men out of us, so you're kind of free to not grow up that way if you don't want to.
Superman and Batman go to a small claims court together. I knew they'd cast [Gal Gadot], I had seen pictures of her, I remembered seeing her doing parts in movies and I went and re-watched stuff with hers and then met with her.
I worked for seven years doing computer graphics to pay my way through graduate school - I have no romance with computer work. There's no amount of phony graphics and things making sound effects on the screen that can change that.
[Keeping Up with the Joneses] is not one of those movies where people get shot and fall down and there's no reality of what would happen if you got shot and knocked over a motorcycle. It's meant to be a slight comedy in that sense.
Brian Eno records and music got me through. It made me feel like there were other people out there who had the same questions and fears and unhappiness. Particularly those kinds of artists who were writing songs about exactly those things.
Isla [Fisher] is so pretty we were trying to decide who the hell should play against her that would intimidate her, and one day I said, "You know...this was before Superman had come out, Superman v. Batman: The Court Room Drama I like to call it.
I remember on my very first film, which Steven Soderberg executive-produced, he said, 'Try not to repeat yourself. Do things that scare you.' Even if it's a challenge, I want people to say that this guy tried this thing. Hopefully he learned from it.
I was naïve when I was young, I was sheltered. I had illusions about who I was going to be, delusions, and a little bit of pretentiousness. And I thought, "I'll write the guy like that. It'll allow me to make fun of everyone else if I make fun of myself."
When I read a script, I always - the first question I ask myself is, 'Is there something that I could bring to it that maybe the next guy wouldn't?' Because I've read a lot of very good scripts and thought there are people who could do this better than I.
Believe me, there is a ton of stuff we shot on Superbad that was unusable, because people were just riffing and riffing. It's just part of the Judd Apatow method, and part of the technique is to also be able to rewrite the movie again in the editing room.