Top 70 Quotes & Sayings by Greg Mottola

I'm the most awkward man alive.

I remember on my very first film, which Steven Soderberg executive-produced, he said, 'Try not to repeat yourself. Do things that scare you.' Even if it's a challenge, I want people to say that this guy tried this thing. Hopefully he learned from it.

I specialize in movies that people say are underrated, with the exception of 'Superbad.'

I worry that I would actually hurt my career doing something I didn't enjoy.

I certainly did work at an amusement park. In 1985. Wow - I'm in denial about the year. I was in college, and I had no skills.

It's like I'm thin skinned, I guess, but I thought I could never write about my youth for the longest time. It took getting to my forties before I could even look back on it.

I worked for seven years doing computer graphics to pay my way through graduate school - I have no romance with computer work. There's no amount of phony graphics and things making sound effects on the screen that can change that.

Having grown up in a Catholic family, while I felt like I was never conscious of any blatant anti-Semitism, I was aware of a slightly insidious, us-versus-them mentality. A lot of my best friends and early girlfriends were Jewish, and I encountered what was more of a suburban small-mindedness, of people needing to defend their tribe.

I have scripts that I've only shown to animals... and they passed on them.

The joke is that no matter how much we think we can evolve, we'll never escape our limitations.

When I read a script, I always - the first question I ask myself is, 'Is there something that I could bring to it that maybe the next guy wouldn't?' Because I've read a lot of very good scripts and thought there are people who could do this better than I.

I have a long love of fantasy and science-fiction.

To me, it's important to try and make an emotional connection with the audience.

I like writing, but it really can be a struggle for me.

When you're a young person, the solace one can get from popular music is something I just have tremendous nostalgia for, affection for. I still have it.

I feel like I came from a generation where... We didn't have Vietnam. We didn't have World War II. Nothing cultural was thrust upon us to make men out of us, so you're kind of free to not grow up that way if you don't want to.

Some scenes comes together really quickly, and some scenes are disasters that take forever. But it sort of works itself out over time.

I'm not someone who's gone to Comic Con as a devotee.

When I first saw 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High,' I thought: That's what my life is like. That's my day-to-day.

'Sugarland Express' is a movie that I really loved and watched a lot.

I kind of thought I would only work exclusively in the world of naturalistic comedy drama, but there is this side of me that also loves Hollywood, and I wanted to see what that felt like.

I have alopecia. My hair fell out when I was in college and I didn't take it so well.

'Duel' is one of the greatest suspense films of all time.

I'd like to think I have a strange affinity for the embarrassing. Not sure what that says about me. But I like the awkward, uncomfortable comedy.

The truth is, good actors are always looking to do something different. They are dying to play slightly odder characters or work on movies that aren't straight down the middle.

For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.

My own personal geek culture years were when I was much younger. I collected comic books up until a certain age. I wanted to be a comic book artist when I was younger.

I don't like high concept movies very much, and the kind of scripts that I would occasionally get offered tended to be really high concept comedies or romantic comedies. I just don't like it. I like much more realistic movies with actual psychology and behavior in them.

I have some pride in the things I've done, but I'm pretty hard on myself. Part of looking at my old work is to motivate me to try harder.

The crazy thing about independent filmmaking is that you're so judged on your first film. It almost needs to be one of those groundbreaking 'I've-never-seen-that-before'-type movies.

I can't seem to escape comedy. Whenever I sit down and try to write something serious, it just doesn't work.

I have a little bit of a pet peeve about how the middle class is depicted in movies. I feel like they tend to be either depicted in a very sentimental way, where everybody has a heart of gold except for the villains you're supposed to hiss at, or there's a sort of indie-style version... When it's done well, it's brilliant, it's 'Blue Velvet.'

I think I am attracted to that time in life when your worldview is still forming in small ways.

In indies, life is very dark and realistic, and in mainstream films, the edges are all rounded off and very sentimentalized.

Film school didn't prepare me for the fact that you have to manage so many different personalities at every stage, and I learned nothing about what to do when a movie was finished.

The Holy Grail audience are young people and, at the end of the day, that's who gets courted.

I had always thought my fantasy career would be making indie films and doing my own thing. But then 'Superbad' came along, and it totally changed everything. It was so hilarious and smart and extreme; you could probably do a psychoanalysis term paper on the male sexual psyche going on there.

My first-ever job in the movie business, I was an art student at Carnegie Mellon, and they were shooting the movie 'Gung Ho' in Pittsburgh, and I worked as an extra for a few days. Michael Keaton bumped into me in one scene, and it's in the movie. And I worshipped him.

[Keeping Up with the Joneses] is not one of those movies where people get shot and fall down and there's no reality of what would happen if you got shot and knocked over a motorcycle. It's meant to be a slight comedy in that sense.

Isla [Fisher] is so pretty we were trying to decide who the hell should play against her that would intimidate her, and one day I said, "You know...this was before Superman had come out, Superman v. Batman: The Court Room Drama I like to call it.

Brian Eno records and music became a huge obsession of mine in college, in a way that a pop song can provide solace. I don't know if it's shallow or silly, but it meant so much to me.

The first person I met in the business was David Heyman, who was a producer on Daytrippers and who went on to produce the highly-unsuccessful Harry Potter series.

One of the dangers of making a movie about young people is it's potentially trite.

Jon Hamm is incredibly good at playing people who have secrets and are hiding aspects of their personality, and obviously Don Draper had a lot of that.

Brian Eno records and music got me through. It made me feel like there were other people out there who had the same questions and fears and unhappiness. Particularly those kinds of artists who were writing songs about exactly those things.

I feel like I'm long overdue for a "one for me" movie, so I've got two low-budget indy personal things I'm working on.

I was in college - Carnegie Mellon, which is one of the reasons Pittsburgh was appealing to me - and I personally feel that whole world of what we used to call "college radio" is a big part of what kept me sane through a period where I stopped dating, I felt like a freak, I felt like no girl would like me. You know, a very adolescent response to losing my hair. I turned to obsessing about The Replacements and The Smiths and R.E.M. and getting further into The Velvet Underground. People who, in my sheltered suburban life, I knew of, but didn't know fully.

I'm a huge fan of Zach's [Galifianakis] and I auditioned Zach a million years ago on a movie called Duplex which I was fired from. But Zach came in - It was like 2000, maybe - as a buddy stand-up that people were starting to notice and there was something about him I loved. He wasn't quite right for the part in [Keeping Up with the Joneses] and I got fired anyway, so who cares? But I always wanted to work with Zach.

I was naïve when I was young, I was sheltered. I had illusions about who I was going to be, delusions, and a little bit of pretentiousness. And I thought, "I'll write the guy like that. It'll allow me to make fun of everyone else if I make fun of myself."

I talked about the summer of 1985, when I worked at an amusement park on Long Island, the kind of place where someone would pull a knife on you if they wanted a better prize than you were giving them. You found a lot of used needles beside the cotton-candy cart at the end of the night. It was a pretty white-trash, scary place. It was one in a series of terrible jobs I've had, coming from not much money and having no particularly resourceful skills. And at one point one of my friends, a writer on the show, Jenny Konner, said, "You should write about that."

I have a little bit of a pet peeve about how the middle class is depicted in movies. I feel like they tend to be either depicted in a very sentimental way, where everybody has a heart of gold except for the villains you're supposed to hiss at, or there's a sort of indie-style version... When it's done well, it's brilliant, it's Blue Velvet. But when it's done poorly, it feels like shooting fish in a barrel, just saying, "Ooh, scary suburbs."

I feel this way about a lot of movies, that the characters are idealized versions of people. For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.

I don't see that many movies where people are depicting middle-class suburban life in a more textured way. My feelings about the suburbs are not so wonderful, so my movies tend to be a little melancholy.

I've been co-writing a TV thing with Bryan Cranston, which we are going to find out soon if it's moving forward or not which is for Amazon.

My first love will always be movies.

I don't really talk about this because it seems indulgent, but I lost my hair, I'm bald, I had alopecia in my teens. That was back in the late '80s, well before people shaved their heads. So it's probably one of the reasons why I have been obsessed with that age, because it's locked in time where I feel like I had this personal loss that so affected my vanity, and I don't really feel like I handled it well. I'm so much older now, so it's not a big deal, but when I think back at it, I can conjure up how I felt then.

When I was a TV director working on Judd Apatow's show Undeclared. I was surrounded by so many young people. People like Seth Rogen, who was 9 years old or something. It was just a ridiculous amount of talented young people. I started to think I'd like to see a young-love movie, but not one done in that glossy, Hollywood, high-concept manner we've become accustomed to. One that was, for lack of a better way of putting it, a little more ambiguous, '70s-style, where everyone was flawed, middle-class characters.

Jon Hamm was the first I thought of for the other role in [Keeping Up with the Joneses], I recently worked with him on Clear History, an HBO improv movie that we had done together.

We didn't want to make it a parody of Don Draper[in Keeping Up With the Joneses] but we did arrive on this idea that there's a side of Jon Hamm that opens up that would like him to stop living as a professional liar.

It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.