Film Producers From The United States

"When I think of John Carpenter, I am amazed at the fact that we take him for granted. How can we? Why should we? He is lightning in a bottle"

"I staggered through my career and came out the other end, alive. I made some films that meant something to me. In my opinion, they weren’t all great, and they weren’t all successful, but they sure were ‘me’. And this is what I was going through or thinking or feeling as a director at the time, and I’m very proud of them. A lot of great directors just never had the chance to have their work appreciated and celebrated and watched, all these years after they were made. So, man, what do you want out of life? It’s great!"

"You have to not be arrogant and say you know better, and you have to not thwart their creativity because they are creative people and they have a very different point-of-view than a filmmaker on how to get people in the seats. So, it’s a balance, like everything in life, between keeping your focus and being overly constricting. So, if you want to be a filmmaker, you have to realize what a long arbiter a movie is cut of and shaped on, how many phases there are to it, and how long you have to be totally focused on your story and the movie itself, and how it seemed one way but making a film is really trench warfare."

"[Asked why he never made a film like the art house titles his company distributed: I]t's an economic situation. All of those films were made in Europe with government subsidies. Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut did not have the necessity of having to earn their money back and so they were free to do what they liked. In the US it's different. It's a money-making industry, so that's what you have to do"

"I come across as a very straightforward guy and that tends to surprise people [...] Clearly my subconscious mind must be some kind of boiling inferno."

"I don't know if I would say I'm an artist. [...] I would say that I'm a craftsman. I attempt to ply my trade in the best possible way. If occasionally something transcends the craft, then that's wonderful. [...] It doesn't happen very often."

"My father was an engineer and I intended to follow in his footsteps, but movies became my real passion. Careful planning is important in engineering, so I used that experience to focus on film preproduction. With the low budgets I had, I couldn't afford to have the cast and crew waiting around for days on a 10-day picture while I figured out how and what to shoot."

"We were shooting a Ku Klux Klan parade led by Bill [William Shatner], and he went through the black part of town in a parade of cars carrying crosses with the hoods, and then they burned the flaming cross. We shot late at night; I said, "Cut, print!" and everybody went, "Yeah, we're out of here!" Guys raced to their cars, the grips threw the last couple of things in the trucks and we just drove straight north."

"It's not so much watching them but understanding how they were made – the preparation and willingness to deviate when necessary especially if you're on a low budget, I also took every film I made seriously and did my best on every one."

"The first Elm Street was such a fresh idea and it absolutely blew me away. But the second one didn’t have Wes involved and I think it suffered as a result of that. With the third one Wes and his writing partner Bruce Wagner already had a script before I came onboard. Then me and Frank Darabont did some re-writes. We thought ‘why can’t we make this film wilder and much more fun that the first one’. I realised that the heart of it was these adolescent kids. These 15/16 year old kids who are just at that age when you start to realise that bad things happen in the world. Of course, none of the adults believe the kids about Freddy so going to them always makes things worse in these films."

"Stephen Sommers certainly knew what he was doing. Indiana Jones is a hardened cynical guy with a heart of mush and Stephen created an Indiana Jones-lite, one who was a jocular guy willing to take a pie to the face, handle a gun, work in a fist fight, and handle all the requirements of an action hero. Brendan has the unique ability to take a pie to the face, let himself be in a situation where he feels overwhelmed, and then survive. This was definitely in the wheel house of Indiana Jones and always has been. It was quite conscious on Stephen’s part and now I’ve done something different with it."

"When I think back on Kong, that was like difficult too, because there was no reality in making that movie. There was so much that was left to my own devices and imagination. And when I had to play a scene opposite a 45-foot ape, that was bit taxing on your imagination because obviously there was nothing there, you know."

"I’ve been a vegetarian for 14 years now, and a lot of the time I avoid going to restaurants. I eat at home. … I’ve never had any desire to eat meat. In fact, when I was a kid I would have a really difficult time eating meat at all. It had to be the perfect bite, with no fat or gristle or bone or anything like that…. I don’t judge people who eat meat—that’s not for me to say—but the whole thing just sort of bums me out."

"We started shooting the film before they'd even come up with a working model of King Kong, it wasn't unusual for the wardrobe to be decided on the day before a scene was going to be shot - usually those things are worked out months in advance. We had a veteran crew, and our cameraman, Harold Wellman, had actually worked on the original 'King Kong' in 1933. It was my first movie, of course, and people would take me aside and tell me that no matter how many more movies I made, I'd never make another one like this"

"When people ask me why I don’t eat meat or any other animal products, I say because they are unhealthy and they are the product of a violent and inhumane industry. Chickens, cows, and pigs in factory farms spend their whole lives in filthy, cramped conditions only to die a prolonged and painful death."

"If you had the opportunity to save a million people from preventable death, would you do it? … This is not merely a rhetorical question, but one that members of the Congress will have to answer in the present… Right now, legislation has already passed the House of Representatives that would do just that. And it was included in the newly released COVID relief bill that is being negotiated between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. It would require the Treasury Department, which represents our government at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to support a multi-trillion dollar relief package from the Fund... And they do not cost the U.S. government anything at all — not now, and not at any time in the future. The IMF leadership, and almost all of the 189 member countries — including U.S. allies such as Germany and Canada — are ready to allocate the aid that Congress is considering. The reason it hasn’t already been approved at the IMF is that the U.S. Treasury has said no, and the U.S. — alone — has a veto at the IMF on this matter. .. [I]t’s not at all clear why the Treasury is blocking this desperately needed aid. … Nor is there any reason that it should be a partisan issue... It would take almost no effort to include the House or Senate bill that would unblock Treasury’s hold on the IMF funding…"

"First of all, I think the United States is the greatest country in the world to invest in. And we see that. And we see that money is pouring into the United States for those reasons. So I think we're really going to be focused on economic growth and creating jobs. And that's really going to be the priority."

"Aw!! Did you think this was a personal trip?! Adorable! Do you think the US govt paid for our honeymoon or personal travel?! Lololol. Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes OR in self sacrifice to your country? I’m pretty sure we paid more taxes toward our day “trip” than you did. Pretty sure the amount we sacrifice per year is a lot more than you’d be willing to sacrifice if the choice was yours. You’re adorably out of touch. Thanks for the passive aggressive nasty comment. Your kids look very cute. Your life looks cute. I know you’re mad but deep down you’re really nice and so am I. Sending me passive aggressive Instagram comments isn’t going to make life feel better. Maybe a nice message, one filled with wisdom and hunanity would get more traction. Have a pleasant evening. Go chill out and watch the new game of thrones. It’s fab!"

"We're going to federal court to look for radical transparency... What the Democrats are doing are generating — you got the printing press going — they're generating ballots everywhere. You got ballots coming out of — you got new votes in Georgia, got new votes in Pennsylvania..."

"I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."

"[He's a] whiner...I don’t think that the alt-right is anti-Semitic at all...Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don’t believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic."

"If Bernie Sanders had an ounce of [[Michael Avenatti|[Michael] Avenatti’s]] fearlessness, he would’ve been the Democratic nominee, and we would have had a much tougher time beating him. Now, I don’t believe a professional politician is going to be there at the end of the day. I’ve always said it’s going to be someone like Oprah, or Avenatti, or somebody that’s more media-savvy that’s going to be there."

"The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."

"We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy. We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation. We hire people who are freaks. They don’t have social lives. They’re junkies about news and information."

"When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society."

"And we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years. ... Now that call converges with something we have to face, and it’s a very unpleasant topic, but we are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it."

"Until we have the black working class and the Hispanic working class getting high-value-added jobs, we've failed as a society. To me: citizens first. And we don't need a million immigrants in this country. Particularly, we don't need a million immigrants that don't come with a real set of skills."

"[Re Spicer loss of credibility] Are you kidding me? We think that's a badge of honor. 'Questioning his integrity' are you kidding me? The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and no hard work."

"Something true most people won’t say: Steve Bannon sacrificed his whole life for his country. His life will never be the same again. He was called a white supremacist and neo-Nazi by the press because they recognized what a formidable adversary he was."

"No sane person would hire Steven Bannon for a job that included making the trains run on time."

"Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue."

"Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White House. It was a flaky career that got him here. Catholic school in Richmond, Virginia. Then a local college, Virginia Tech. Then seven years in the Navy, a lieutenant on a ship duty and then in the Pentagon. While on active duty, he got a master's degree at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, but then he washed out of his naval career. Then an MBA from Harvard Business School. Then four years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs- his final two years focusing on the media industry in Los Angeles- but not rising above a midlevel position. In 1990, at the age of thirty-seven, Bannon entered peripatetic entrepreneurhood under the auspices of Bannon & Co., a financial advisory firm to the entertainment industry. This was something of a hustler's shell company, hanging out a shingle in an industry of a small center of success and concentric rings radiating out of rising, aspiring, falling, and failing strivers. Bannon & Co., skirting falling and failing, made it to aspiring by raising small amounts of money for independent film projects- none a hit. Bannon was rather a movie figure himself. A type. Alcohol. Bad marriages. Cash-strapped in a business where the measure of success is excesses of riches. Ever scheming. Ever disappointed. For a man with a strong sense of his own destiny, he tended to be hardly noticed."

"Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination."

"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind."

"Steve had very little to do with our historic victory."

"Chinese media is taking aim at Steve Bannon, with one broadcaster calling the former White House adviser a “shameless anti-Chinese pioneer” over the weekend."

"I want to thank Steve Bannon for his service. He came to the campaign during my run against Crooked Hillary Clinton - it was great! Thanks S"

"Trump (and Bannon and other right-wing authoritarian leaders around the world) is often referred to as a "populist" because he displays faux concern for the working class and a resentment of science and education, but his policies are in fact grotesquely elitist. If by "populist" we mean whipping up resentment against immigrants and people of color, then we should say that. Otherwise, "populism" is just a lazy euphemism for racism."

"Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, has used tough rhetoric on China’s ruling Communist Party since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, accusing the regime of “premeditated murder” and estimating the country owes the world “north of $5 trillion” for economic devastation wrought by the virus."

"Mike Lindell: "'The Big Lie' is the big lie." Steve: [Laughter] Is that like a Zen koan? Like "the sound of one hand clapping in the forest"?!"

"The Hard Drive From Hell: you come for the porn, but you stay for the compromise."

"If Andrew [Breitbart] were still around, I bet he'd tell Bannon to stay in Europe — and not just because his tendency to wear several shirts seems more consistent with European fashion. Bannon's understanding of conservatism is entirely European... Conservatism in America has always been deeply traditionalist, sometimes too much so. But at the core of the modern conservative movement has been the effort to protect, defend and conserve the traditions of a liberal revolution, grounded in the best arguments of the enlightenment (slavery notwithstanding). Bannon's potted blood and soil nationalism and racially tinged populism runs counter to that project and the best and highest ideals of conservatism and America itself. He turned Andrew's Breitbart.com into a "platform" (his word) for the alt-right seeking to inject European swill into the American body politic. Let him stay in Europe and hand out torches for the marchers. His un-American schtick has no place here. I'm sure Andrew would agree."

"The dead will rise again — at least in Pennsylvania, to vote."

"Pennsylvania, if you don't win this now, not only will you never win again — you don't deserve to win again."

"Donald J. Trump today announced that Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon has been appointed CEO, temporarily stepping down from his role with Breitbart News to work full-time on Mr. Trump’s campaign in a new position designed to bolster the business-like approach of Mr. Trump’s campaign."

"Everybody take a deep breath. Not only do we got this, we already own this. Okay: He's President of the United States; He won a resounding victory on votes that matter. Right? You have Black Lives Matter, you have All Lives Matter — we have Votes That Matter. Votes that matter are: certifiable, verifiable, legal votes that were voted on the third of November, the year of our Lord 2020."

"The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while...I want you to quote this, the media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States... The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong. [The 2016 election was] a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there...You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party."

"There is no day of infamy yesterday. Everybody take a deep breath, say a prayer, commit yourself, trust the process... Because we've won, not "We're going to win, ..." The President has won... We're not going to play these games, 50,000 ballots here, no postmark... Burke's dictum: We owe as much to those who came before us.. Everybody says it's all for the kids, for the grandkids, yes... But Burke told us... we have a moral obligation to take that, and make it better and pass it on... and doing that, you respect your obligations to those that came before you... Jack Maxey: the men at Normandy, tell us about them... Twenty years of age.. Everybody that voted on the third: Pres. Trump took an oath to God.. You have a moral obligation, direct connection, to those kids that died at Normandy, that couldn't even vote. Did they whine? Did they cry? And they knew they were going to certain death... You're going into that.. The only way we're going to get through is to push ourselves through... Stop with your friends, "I'm so worried. I'm so nervous " STOP IT. We've got this. The only way they can take it is if we give it to them... If you allow that to happen... I want you to explain it to the twenty year old kid in the first wave on D-Day..."

"Here in the Judeo-Christian West we believe in eternal life. In Philadelphia they'll say they believe in eternal voting."

"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now, I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone."