We're producing a movie now, 'The Onion' Movie, and it's very difficult for me to be on the set. If I'm not right in the trenches, it's very difficult for me to watch another director, because I'm not involved and it's not exciting.
The movie is actually from a book by Stephen King called The Body. When they were gonna put it to a motion picture, they found the story was a bit too strong for the title The Body, based on a young kid's movie. It would be too heavy.
'Elizabethtown' was a movie made for all the right reasons, and people who connect with the movie really connect to it. It's not the biggest group of people ever, but I still really believe in 'Elizabethtown.' It wasn't, like, a savage blow.
A movie that I've seen probably the most is 'Fanny & Alexander,' the Ingmar Bergman movie. I even dragged my friends to the super long version that had an intermission. I don't know how much they liked me that day.
The difficulty of getting a movie made through a major studio is so extreme that when a movie comes out, everyone should give it four stars because it was accomplished.
RoboCop the first movie was fantastic. But even if there was no movie, the concept of RoboCop is brilliant, first because it lends itself to a lot of social criticism, but also because it poses a question, 'When do you lose your humanity?'
Whether it's a popcorn movie or some really intellectual sociopolitical movie, I think to some degree they're all influenced by the social climate that we're living in.
That's the only way I can control my movie. If you shoot everything, then everything is liable to end up in the movie. If you have a vision, you don't have to cover every scene.
Then we tried to come up with ideas for the sketches, and then, when we actually shot the movie, we really just sat down - never previewed the movie - we just really winged it.
Look: the day I've made a movie that I think is really good, I hope I say it out loud so somebody can say, 'Then you probably made the worst movie of your entire career.'
There are so many factors when you think of your own films. You think of the people you worked on it with, and somehow forget the movie. You can't forgive the movie for a long time. It takes a few years to look at it with any objectivity and forgive ...
When you shoot an independent movie you have a very limited amount of time, and you don't want to be that actor, when a poor director is trying to get through a movie, that you're asking at every second to discuss performance.
You see a Clint Eastwood movie, and you might not know if it's from Universal or Warner Bros. or another studio. He has affiliations with so many studios now, but there was a time when you'd just look at a movie and think, 'Oh, that's a Warner Bros. ...
If I have a better idea, I say, 'Can we try one like this?' I try not to step on writers' toes, but ninety-nine percent of the time, it ends up in the movie, and sometimes it's the line that everyone remembers and quotes from the movie.
Frankie Minaldi: [introducing the gang to Joe] Here they are, "The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse"! Did you happen to see that movie, Joe? It's a good movie.
The one benefit of having done all kinds of movies as an actor is, you learn the pros and cons of being tempted to do a really big movie because it costs a lot of money.
When they make a woman's picture, they treat it like a 'woman's picture.' In the '40s, they didn't treat Joan Crawford movies like that, but as the big movies of their year. I'm upset that there's no 'Terminator' with a woman in Arnold Schwarzenegger...
I'm like, 'What world am I living in?' Aren't movies made to have something to say? Why make a movie if you don't have something to say? What are you doing it for? Are you doing it because you want to make a lot of money?
Just getting movies made is difficult because it takes a lot of money; I mean, it costs more money to make one movie than most bands will spend on every single record of their entire career; it's a huge undertaking.
Toronto Film Festival is one of those festivals where there are 400 movies, and unless you have a distributor who is super confident and puts a lot of money into it, sometimes movies can go unwatched or unnoticed.
I love the movie 'Taken,' but the dialogue in the beginning of that movie is hilarious. They're talking, these commando types, and there's dialogue like, 'Hopefully your daughter appreciates what you're doing for her. Does she know that you're doing ...
