Usually, like, on 'Mean Girls,' the task that Tina Fey and I set for ourselves was we wanted to maintain a comic intensity throughout the movie, where people just don't really get a break from laughing. And if they do, it's for a brief emotional scen...
I feel totally lucky and happy. I think a lot of young directors feel this way but you sort of, like, have a biological clock that starts ticking and you like feel like you aren't anything until you direct a movie and you need to find yourself and th...
I'm a massive hater of 3D. I don't like it at all. For me, you go to a movie theatre and you want to be taken to a place and transported to a place and be in that environment, and I know 3D is meant to do that, but the effect for me is the reverse. I...
It's the opposite journey from what I've usually done with films. I find it very easy to go from, say, a lit, pleasurable environment, like what you see outside there, to a very dark place. But the opposite journey, which is what this movie takes, is...
When I was a young person working, everybody was older than me, so I had to kind of keep up. I'd see every movie and listen to everything played, and read all the relevant books. Being an actor, it's kind of your job to know what came before you and ...
I like to do a movie, to be on it 8, 10 weeks. It evolves as you're working on it. Little things come to you every day. It's a slow process, and when you have to pack it into a short period of time, which you do for television, the experience is not ...
I watched some serious '80s television. 'Alice,' 'Good Times,' 'The Jeffersons,' 'Family Ties,' 'Cheers'... every night it was eat dinner, watch 'Cheers.' I was actually on 'Jeopardy' with Rebecca Lobo and Dot Richardson, and we were laughing because...
Spike optioned my first book, 'Now the Hell Will Start,' and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dial...
I didn't have money to eat when I was 21. When I was short on cash, I would sometimes scam food from fast food places. I'd go into fast food chains and pretend I was from a movie studio, tell them they didn't send us the right order and demand they f...
I don't want to do anything and everything. I want to be a brand that, every time I leverage my name, I want people to feel sure that it's going to be something good - so whether it be my movies, my perfume, my restaurant, my musical, it'll be good w...
I've realized as well after five years of being on the road that if I'm going to four or five months of my life to something even if I'm overpaid, it's four or five months of my life away from home, away from my son, away from family and friends. I b...
Many friends of mine told me that normally only guys like a kung fu movie and the girls would be turned off - they want to see a love story. But Ip Man is a family man, so the women see this and go: 'I want my husband to be like this man. He'll be a ...
I am kind of a private person, so I don't miss that part of show business at all. Looking back on my career in television and making a movie like 'The Sound of Music' from an adult point of view, it actually seems kind of unreal. I was involved in sh...
When I was starting out, I didn't know what the hell I was doing and my person who was helping me out, I didn't even have an agent, got me five or six big auditions for leads in movies in 1986 that I had no business auditioning for. I think I ran out...
To tell you the truth, when I came along in this business and thinking about being an actress, I had no idea things would get so graphic and nudey-orientated. I knew you had to have the physical appeal of a woman was always important thing in movies....
Our lives are pretty calm. Merging on the freeway in the closest you get to risking your life. So what's missing now is that primal emotion of being scared to death, and I think that's why people crave thrills like roller coasters or scary movies. Th...
I remember being on film sets when I was younger, and only men got to do the cool action movies. So I thought, 'Maybe I'll get to produce one day and get to do cool stuff too,' which is what happened when we did 'Charlie's Angels.' Starting my produc...
I had a couple of really cool friends when I was a kid, and we'd find cool music and movies and show them to each other. My friend Dennis had a copy of 'A Clockwork Orange' and he'd already seen it once, and he was like, 'We need to watch this.' I wa...
When I do a movie, that's just a couple months out of my year and out of my life. All the other months I'm just at home, running around doing errands with my mom and going to sleepovers. I feel like I have that side of my life, and then I also do the...
You don't know what someone's going to walk away from a movie with, but you hope it's something positive, but if nothing, you want them most basically to be entertained and engaged. That's your job. But you also hope to give them something to chew on...
Whenever you're writing a book or creating a movie or a game, your first task is to get the reader/audience/player to suspend disbelief, to buy into the logic and boundaries of your world, even though those boundaries might include things like dragon...
