Film Directors From The United States

"When [Powerpuff Girls] was tested, everyone hated it. There were 11-year-old boys telling me I should be fired and it was the worst cartoon they've ever seen in their life."

"I wasn't put on this earth to act. I was put on this earth to share and to be an example of the power and wisdom and grace and mercy of God in my life."

"I actually kissed a man in the film, but they took it out, they cut it. I think they got chicken."

"But I do see you today. And I’m encouraged by what I see. I’m strengthened by what I see. I love what I see."

"If you don’t love your fellow man, women, person, then you don’t have anything."

"I'm an actor, not a politician. I don't represent a race. I don't represent any group. I just represent the character I'm playing at the time."

"I’m surprised by the success of anything I do, but it’s gratifying when the public approves."

"I actually go, 'Wow! How lucky can a girl get?"

"The creatures were fun. They gave me a little problem at the beginning when we started to train them! But we finally got to be friends"

"From the time I was a very young kid I didn’t want to do anything but make movies the rest of my life."

"I like some of the sci fi and horror films made today but too many of them rely on digital effects, even when they’re not really called for."

"My whole goal, besides trying to get more production value back into animation, was really to provide an environment like there was at Disney at one time, where you felt secure as an artist, filmmaker, contributor, animator. You could plan your life, have a place to raise your family, have a home and not worry about living like a gypsy. Personally, I can say I've been in the business for 28 years and have never been unemployed...though sometimes not paid. We've done our best to try to take care of our people. We've done our best to try to make good stories. How many people have gone out and hired sometimes over 500 people and come up with over $450,000 a week in salaries and still tried to create a quality product? It's not an easy thing to do...but it gives a great feeling of accomplishment."

"When business executives are making the artistic decisions and don't understand animation, things can go awry. Now they call in all of the authority figures they can find and hire them – the cost has gone up. The picture may or may not get better, but definitely, it gets more cumbersome. It's like trying to turn around an army of tanks, instead of being able to move lightly on your feet or being able to listen to what's going on inside of you – because that's what's telling you what to do. It gets bogged down."

"I think the destiny of all men is to be kings, the destiny of all women is to be queens. In some fashion or another, that's the destiny that we call it family but it's supposed to be that."

"I don’t have a job - I have a career. This may sound like semantics, (maybe it is) but to me a job is something you depend on from an employer. It’s theirs to give and theirs to take away... A career is something i have to be responsible for based on my reputation, my ability, and my preferences."

"Thinking of Edward Scissorhands, a nostalgic wave washes over me."

"I can't think of a production designer working today who if offered the chance to design a horrible, rundown carnival/circus with all of the tents and wagons and all of the grotesquery, wouldn't leap at the opportunity because it's so much fun at an aesthetic level."

"The black subject reveals the inability of social movements grounded in Gramscian discourse to think of white supremacy (rather than capitalism) as the base and thereby calls into question their claim to elaborate a comprehensive and decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations—formations that can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and hegemony—but they are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror."

"We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety. There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of worker but with the imposition that workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and ensure the coherence of Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other postrevolutionary possibilities—that is, idleness."

"Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent, a phenomenon that is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. ... Capital was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a white body with variable capital. Thus, one could say that slavery is closer to capital’s primal desire than is exploitation. It is a relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Second, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the direct relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of slavery—that is, the reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex—has once again as its structuring metaphor and primary target the black body."

"I do rough drawings. And then I work with concept artists who see my rough drawings and say “oh this is what you want!” And they generate, just gorgeous concept art, and then when people sign off on it, we really love everything, then you get a blueprint. You take the blueprint and go “oh I see.” And so the set decorator, costume designer, everyone gets it, and without slavishly copying it, although concept art and stills from our show usually match up, that’s fun. It’s all about control."

"Good ideas can go bad because they’re made for the wrong reasons. The mission isn’t the right mission. Even though all the players may be noble players, the mission itself is fundamentally flawed."

"The worker calls into question the legitimacy of productive practices, while the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself."

"Whiteness, then—and, by extension, civil society cannot be solely “represented” as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply “protected” by the police. They are—in their very corporeality—the police."

"Filmmaking is hard work, and there are plenty of times when you're just exhausted, and you haven't slept in a while, and you're just watching, and you're looking at something, and you're thinking, "Man, this is not going to work, this is going to be the stupidest thing.""

"I scare easily! I think that’s part of the reason I can make horror movies, I can relate to just being scared."

"As an artist, as much as some say they don’t care what the audience thinks, I think that’s bullshit. The bottom line as artists, we want people to respond to our work, we want to move people emotionally. That’s the whole purpose in life!"

"In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes two moves with respect to civil society. First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe—the motherland. Then, with respect to the colony, he locates it only in the zone of the settler. This second move is vital for our understanding of black positionality in America and for understanding the, at best, limitations of radical social movements in America. For if we are to follow Fanon’s analysis and the gestures toward this understanding in some of the work of imprisoned intellectuals, then we have to come to grips with the fact that, for black people, civil society itself—rather than its abuses or shortcomings—is a state of emergency."

"I look for beauty and a pleasing aesthetic within the most mundane, most banal and try to find beauty. As horrible as those places are, you still get it and think it’s sort of cool. The goal is to experience it cinematically and in person and bathe in it."

"There’s something about our nature that feels a connection to some otherworldly connection in our lives."

"When you’re making a film, you come up with so much material and so much of that material ends up going unused. So, I think transmedia gives you a chance to use that extra material. You know, with Blair Witch we did a whole documentary using at least 50% of unused footage from the first movie. So as a filmmaker, it’s a great opportunity to dive into your story more and gives you a chance to explore any unused ideas. You know, it opens things up and keeps things fresh. Especially because when you write a film, shoot a film, and edit a film, you’re stuck in that world and narrative for so long and I think transmedia gives you a great opportunity to step outside of that for a moment and work on something else without abandoning the project entirely."

"In movies you kind of work out your issues, but then you realize, those kind of traumatic issues stay with you forever so somehow they kind of keep reoccurring, no matter how hard I try to get them out of my head they sort of stay there."

"I never really got nightmares from movies. I was much more terrified by my own family and real life, you know?"

"People say, “Monster movies—they’re all fantasy.” Well, fantasy isn’t fantasy—it’s reality if it connects to you. It’s like a dream. You have a nightmare, and it’s got all this crazy imagery, but it’s real. You wake up in a cold sweat, freaking out. That’s completely real. So I always found that those people trying to categorize normal versus abnormal or light versus dark, yada yada, are all missing the point."

"There’s something beautiful about the stop-motion process, being able to touch the puppets. That’s such a personal feeling, even the medium itself, seeing the characters on the set with the lighting and everything. It’s like actually bringing something to life. It’s not the same feeling you get with a computer, where you can do amazing things, but there’s something about moving something and then seeing it come to life that connects you to the beginning of movies. That’s just a feeling; you can’t even really describe it."

"I thought I could put my creativity to use in a good way and give the neighborhoods a voice and maybe change my own situation while doing it."

"I started to write a screenplay on people’s stories and what they were going through."

"We probably had a one percent chance at succeeding because most people who attempt to do this fail, but if you’re not afraid to fail let’s go for it."

"It's a test mentally, physically and spiritually at times. You must try to stay in the process of creating, which will always have obstacles."

"It’s good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way. It’s like weird, twisted poetry, the way kids perceive things. And quite beautiful sometimes. They kind of blow your mind and ground you at the same time"

"It’s funny, it’s amazing how many people go see a movie and have not seen anything about it. People like you and I go to the movies and we’re worried that we’ve seen every scene through all the commercials, and yet half the audience, a lot of people make their decision what movie to see while they’re standing in line. So, I really don’t know. Audiences are getting very specific and segmented, but to me, the dream is still the movie that’s for everyone and it’s harder to reach everyone nowadays."

"I’m bored if I’m not trying to be funny, I always try to keep a sense of humor, at least with the cast. I want to bring out their creativity and humor and let them know that the set is a place where they’re not being judged. If everyone’s having a good time, then they’re probably feeling looser and more creative."

"Those people with a sense of humor get by more comfortably than those who don’t."

"Every morning I pick up my newspaper, get the obituary section, see if I'm listed, and if not, I have my breakfast."

"I’ve also seen both sexes mistreat their servants, servants’ children, and scream abuses at poor people in the markets. In Pakistan, abuse is not as openly discussed as it is in the West. Abuse seems to be more acceptable as long as one maintains a luxury lifestyle."

"I understand why some women choose to wear burqas as a protective cover to keep the men from staring,” said Ritchie, speaking of her experience of Pakistan. “It’s important to note that both women and men stare, but men are more obvious. In Islam, men are taught to lower their gaze in front of a woman, but that does not happen often."

"Whatever and whoever Ms. Ritchie,..., however many ‘privileges’ she enjoys, is a separate matter. Without any reference to the individuals she has pointed fingers at, because there is no way of knowing if those accusations are genuine- her claims of the harassment suffered by women in general at the hands of men in general, are distressingly true, and when there is even a grain of truth in a matter, it warrants attention. And what Ms. Richie has said contains more than just a grain."

"The thing nobody ever tells you about marriage is that sometimes it makes you lonelier than being alone ever could."

"There was an immediate rapport between us, and our relationship was more than director and star; there was a great friendship, and a great mutual respect. I loved the old buzzard. You either hated him or you loved him, there was no half-way measure at all. He liked me because I never "yessed" him, and contrary to popular opinion, DeMille hated yes-men. There were a lot of people around him who were yes-men because he was such a powerful producer-director, but they wouldn't last. He'd always say, "I don't want 50 little DeMilles running around—it's bad enough to have one!""

"I loved DeMille and he loved me. We only made Union Pacific together, but we did lots of radio. We got along great."