Film Producers From The United States

"This is real human drama, we're not creating some amusement park ride for the summer. Even though the movie is really exciting to watch, it's got a real pathos behind it."

"One of the unique things is that whether we were out at sea or in the middle of the water tank, a lot of times you just couldn't leave. Especially when we were out at sea."

"You were there all day long, 12 hours a day. So there was none of this, "I'm going back to my trailer, my trailer's bigger than your trailer," that kind of Hollywood nonsense."

"Sweet berry wine!"

"I try to take things that challenge me either physically or mentally, or I have to learn a new skill."

"God forbid you got seasick because there was no option to go back. So that really did force us to be a group."

""(infuriated)" I'M GONNA WRECK IT!"

"Oh, absolutely, it felt more serious than your typical job. One of the things that got us through how difficult the shooting actually was was that we are telling a real story."

"There's something about the water - that solitary kind of peaceful feeling. You're on Earth, but not quite."

"Her ability to create characters who have both humor and deep emotional impact is unparalleled."

"I think the film is so interesting because I have never had an outpouring like this in my entire life as an actor. We shift stories in our own lives to be able to survive them, about our own family and whatever traumas we have walked through, to make them somehow palatable. And somehow, in adulthood, it's like we have to relive those stories in order to find healing in them."

"I like to be a little bit of a rebel as an actor, so I am interested in the unpopular person and the lesser-understood character. It's a bold choice to try to find empathy in an unlikeable place in storytelling."

"With the technology, we’ve become more apathetic, because we don’t look in each other’s eyes any more as we attempt communication. But at the same time, with one iPhone, we can start a revolution. If there’s injustice, you just film it and post it. And suddenly people are tapped into a current event they wouldn’t otherwise see, and that’s incredible."

"Many of us were taught not to tattle. It was a culture of silencing and that was normalized. I urge all of us to not only support survivors and bystanders, who are brave enough to tell their truth, but to promote restorative justice. May we also please protect and employ them. May we teach our children that speaking out without the fear of retribution, is our culture’s new North Star."

"I will cherish this as a reminder of the extraordinary, incredible outpouring of people who demanded their voice be heard in this last election so we can look forward to amazing change in this country."

"I have never had an experience (like 'Star Wars'), and that includes 'Jurassic Park,' of what it feels like to be a character to young children that feels otherworldly or iconic or whatever that is. So now, I've had this amazing experience of little kids seeing me and instead of wanting to talk about the movie, they kind of back away, a little scared. It's like when you go to Disneyland and see Mickey Mouse and you're little. It's a weird thing that 'Star Wars' holds something a bit untouchable or something like that."

"I never had a misunderstanding of what [acting] was about. Unfortunately, overall, movies are a conglomerate. People buy and sell people in this business, which can get really ugly unless you have the right set of values and understand why you’re doing it. Luckily, I was raised by people who’d already gotten to that point, and seen all the yuck stuff—which is probably why they originally didn’t want me to act. I also understood the difference between getting a part at a Hollywood party and really getting a job. I knew you had to go in and audition and maybe then they’d hire you, and that’s where you start. I also had a good understating about press: that it’s the actor’s responsibility to publicize his or her films, that the press can be fun, that it’s not about hyping yourself into stardom or trying to sell yourself as a hot ticket."

"The thing I love about acting is, whatever character you play, it gives you the chance to expose another side of yourself that maybe you’ve never felt comfortable with, or never knew about. Not that every character is you, but there are underlying emotions that everybody has. I feel that movies are gifts that come to you, and there are no accidents in what you end up doing. I study Jung, who talks a lot about the shadow side, the repressed side."

"I could have never done it if David [Lynch] wasn’t a friend. He was very protective of me, like a big brother—he always has been. When it comes to Wild at Heart, if we had a love scene, everyone was very respectful… There’s no getting it wrong. Daring to go too extreme or too subtle or too anything—he requires it all of you and it’s all such fun and there’s no judgment on a set with David—ever. Except when I bring bottles of water on a set; he hates that."

"There are rules. Very specific rules. You would diminish stakes in the film if everyone—or even anyone else—was also aware of the fourth wall or any kind of meta aspect. Deadpool is the only character who has that ability to do that. If everyone did that, then you would no longer invest in that character as much. You really want to believe that the villain is a villain. You really want to believe that your costar's character is true as well. Deadpool can undermine that—and does undermine that—because you don’t want the audience to take him as seriously."

"I really liked the, uh, the art in the Deadpool comics. You know, I've just kind of always felt a kinship towards him. I mean, I just thought, "I'd like to play that guy some day.""

"I’ve definitely lost all cool. I'm the dad guy now, She’s saying ‘Mama.' What my wife doesn’t realize is [James] calls me ‘Mama,’ too. Seriously. I literally had to sit her down and tell her that penises don’t work that way. She understands -- she gets it. About a month ago, I was sitting in traffic and I was just jamming to 'These Dreams' by Heart, I was killin' it in the car and there was this busload of high school kids that were parked right beside me. I didn't even realize it. I looked over and every one of their jaws were just on the ground laughing their guts out at me. These little high school pricks, you can shove your Nae Nae song up your asses! Twenty years, that’ll be the Nae Nae song, you watch."

"At his core, he’s still very much an engineer."

"What we did was unprecedented, but what is less well understood is that we had no choice."

"Others might have found us eccentric, but I didn’t care. I had discovered my calling. I was a programmer."

"My style was to absorb all the data I could to make the best-informed decision possible, sometimes to the point of over-analysis."

"I’m trying to transmit the visions of creativity and build institutions that are incredibly catalytic to their fields."

"I simply wanted to advance the field of artificial intelligence so that computers could do what they do best (organize and analyze information) to help people do what they do best, those inspired leaps of intuition that fuel original ideas and breakthroughs."

"It's very challenging to carve back market share."

"Our great string of successes had married my vision to his unmatched aptitude for business."

"I’m always interested in finding ways to innovate … . It’s a blend; it’s not a point focus."

"There are relatively few ideas that you can do just by yourself."

"In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success—if you are willing to learn from it."

"There’s going to be reversals. You have to be ready, to be philosophical about that."

"He wanted to do a different brand of science, tackle bigger questions."

"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s]. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences. As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with film—with popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action films—conservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether. In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America."

"The films subsequently produced for the Army by Capra and his team survive as classics of wartime cinematic propaganda- a remarkable accomplishment, in retrospect, since each script had to be approved by some fifty military and civilian agencies in Washington. One of the primary objectives of the series was to combat the isolationist sentiments that lingered in the United States, and with this in mind the seven core films that Capra directed were given the collective title Why We Fight. President Franklin Roosevelt was so impressed by the first of these documentaries that he urged it to be shown in public theaters as well as to recruits. This was done, and Prelude to War went on to win an Academy Award as the best documentary of 1942. During the course of World War Two, the Why We Fight films were required viewing for millions of American soldiers. The series was also distributed abroad, with soundtracks in French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese."

"To be inspired with the will to win, Capra told his associates as they embarked on this work, Americans needed to be shown that they were fighting for the existence of their country, and at the same time were carrying the "torch of freedom" for a better postwar world- a world in which conquest, exploitation, and economic evils had been eliminated, and peace and democracy prevailed. This seemed a clear line, and a familiar one to anyone who recalled the idealistic Allied propaganda of World War One."

"I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries."

"Shortly after the United States entered World War Two, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall summoned Frank Capra, the Hollywood director, and asked him to prepare a series of orientation films for viewing by American troops. When Capra demurred on the grounds that he had never made a documentary before, Marshall retorted: "Capra, I have never been Chief of Staff before. Thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before. Boys are commanding ships today, who a year ago had never seen the ocean before." The director apologized, and promised "The best damned documentary films ever made.""

"I’ve never, ever, in my entire life, been upset at a casting choice. I started taping my dad’s auditions when I was 11, when he was auditioning actors for one of his movies. I would see, over and over again, that there wasn’t just one actor for the role. It was really clear that there were a lot of people who could play a character really well, and it would always come down to something kind of weird and non-obvious as to why a person was cast. If you’re not right, you’re not right, but that’s okay."

"Looking back, I can see how there are challenges for any working parent. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and that was really challenging too. I think it’s hard to be a parent and it’s complicated and there are a lot of difficult decisions that you make for your child and for yourself and for your family. Only now as an adult can I appreciate how courageous it was for my parents to move because they didn’t know anybody there [in Connecticut], and also for my dad’s career it must have been hard being away from LA. But we were always on movie sets. We were never apart. I was sheltered from the industry lifestyle but not from the experience of the set."

"I think everyone has what it takes to be a good actor innately within them. It’s really about connecting to your own humanity and your own behaviors, and getting to a level of self-awareness so that you can have perspective and step outside of yourself and transform and become another person. You can’t become another person if you’re not self-aware; you wouldn’t know what’s changed. [But] the ability to play pretend is something that everyone has access to; you see little kids doing it. On the spectrum of imagination, there are people who are more imaginative than others—I guess some kids are hardcore pretenders and have imaginary friends for years and other kids play and they have fun, but it’s not quite as specific like that. I’m sure there’s a range, but I think everyone can pretend."

"I love all the series I’ve done pretty much equally.I haven’t done a single series that I have been embarrassed by. Some of the movies are better than others."

"I wish I had the answer to that, because if I knew how to create an instantly popular character like that, I would do more of them. It’s weird to me because, on one hand, she’s appealing, but you look at her and she’s not exactly a good role model for girls. And in the past, we have definitely explored some of the darker edges of her story. She was kind of in an on-going abusive relationship with the Joker. So it is weird but maybe a lot of her appeal, at least recently, is because they have separated her from the Joker in comics. She’s become her own standalone character and definitely not in an abusive relationship with the Joker anymore. I guess that is somewhat empowering and people can relate to it. But truthfully, she was a really, really popular character even before all this. I think part of it is probably, to pat my own back, design. She was a really simple basic character in red and black, cute face, cute figure, one and done. So that definitely has to be a part of it."

"It all comes down to the great stories. The colorful and interesting characters that people can invest themselves in. The ones that they want to follow. That is the most critical thing for me. The second thing is, you have to have a filmmaker who gets it. Who has a passion for a character. Who has a vision for a character. Someone who really knows how to execute that vision. It's a hard thing to find. And its essential. The third thing is, and I have been in the trenches of Hollywood for thirty-five years, day by day, trying to make them understand this...Comic books and superheroes are not synonymous."

"This is our modern day mythology, this is American folklore and it's becoming international folklore. The ancient gods of Greece, Rome and Egypt still exist, except now they wear spandex and capes."

"My first exposure to Batman as a character was Batman the TV series. But honestly, I didn’t know it was supposed to be a parody or campy. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Of course, I was 5 at the time. But all in one fell swoop, I became an instant super hero fan. Later on, as I got older and started reading more comics and getting into the super hero scene, I realized that the Batman show was kind of a comedy. I was reading Neal Adams comics and thinking, "Batman is kind of cooler than that show, he’s kind of scary and mysterious." So my perception of Batman changed over time, and then I went through the periods with Frank Miller and the Tim Burton movies. So now I’ve got these warring Batmans in my head. I still love the Adam West/Batman show. I still love the Neal Adams take on Batman comics. I still love The Dark Knight. All of these things totally contradict each other, and yet it’s fine to me. I’ve said it over and over again, Batman as a character is such a strong concept, he’s the kind of character that you can take him in any number of ways and it still feels right."

"I consider myself very sentimental, very sensitive, but obviously my outward appearance is a bit scruffy-haired, and I have a general tendency toward snarling at people, and a sort of misanthropic nature. Maybe that is what people actually read. I do actually believe that misanthropy and sensitivity go hand in hand, because I have a tremendous disappointment in the ways of the world."

"I love filmmaking when fate is a part of the process and you are dependent on the laws of physics and the elements to get a single moment that transports or in some way creates an illusion even for a moment. I think that is tremendous fun and what I think filmmaking is, catching lightning in a bottle. I feel like we are so used to CGI now and thank god because it is a wonderful tool, but there is an element of everything you are looking at has been created in the comfort of a studio. I want to return to a world where I can celebrate when you are really interacting with the world."