Top 107 Quotes & Sayings by James Gunn - Page 2

I was as huge Spider-Man fan as a kid, but I really liked The Defenders a lot. I was also a big Moon Knight fan for some reason.

Maybe it's the feminine side of me, but I like that AM radio pop.

Let's face it: there's still a certain amount of racism in human beings, so that shows up in Hollywood.

I don't have anything against corporate America. I mean, I guess there's something about living in a capitalist society that can get kind of terrifying at times.

Scooby's the greatest cartoon character ever. He isn't cute like Mickey or smart like Bugs or fearless like Woody and Buzz - he's a talking dog who's more human than I am. It's his humanity and imperfections that make him special.

My favorite dark comedy, which is also one of my favorite films of all time, is 'After Hours.' I've seen 'After Hours' as much as almost any film I've ever seen in my life; I've watched it dozens of times, and I still watch it once a year. I still get a thrill out of it every time I see it.

Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy happier.

It's great being a producer! Why am I wasting my career writing and directing? Those are actual jobs in which you work. Being a producer, it's kind of like you just go to the set, yell at a couple of people, and then stay up all night dancing in nightclubs.

For the theatrical experience to survive, spectacle films need to expand their definition of what they can be. They need to be unique and true voices of the filmmakers behind them. They can't just be copying what came before them.

I am loath to suggest 'Visitor Q' to anyone, because you've got to have a warped brain to even understand or appreciate it a little bit. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have been blessed with a warped brain, and I really dug it.

I'm a huge Howard the Duck fan. For people who don't know, I'm a huge Marvel Comics fan, but Howard the Duck was maybe my favorite character as a kid. I went back, and I collected all of those comics. I had every comic he was ever in.

I like to be able to feel as many parts of myself while watching a movie at one time. I think that's what 'Super' is - it's funny, but it's also sad. It's very touching in certain ways, and it's also got a very dark sense of humor. So it's allowed to go anywhere.

Let me tell you one thing: there is no more cutthroat place to be than an independent film. Disney is a cakewalk after that - that is no lie.

I would never want to take on a sequel of someone else's stuff unless I was totally reinventing it.

'Monty Python And The Holy Grail' is a hugely important movie to me. I remember watching it for the first time on cable when I was about 13 years old.

The majority of my life is 'Guardians,' but being able to clean my brain a little bit by doing something totally different like 'Belko' was incredibly helpful to the creative process.

I've been making movies a long time. I'm a professional at it. I'm not a professional at making soundtracks - that's not my job. My job is to put the right songs in the movie so the movie works the best it possibly can.

I'm in favor of anything that will give strong women more visibility in popular culture.

I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I got to direct a movie involving three of my favorite things in the world: space operas, Marvel superheroes and raccoons.

It also is true that some ideas naturally work themselves out over a longer period of time than a single human life can encompass.

The zombie is in a lot of ways the perfect horror movie bad guy. It plays on so many fears all at once. The fear of predators, the fear of disease and the fear of loved ones betraying us - the ones we care about are turning around and trying to eat us.

Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.

In science fiction a fantastic event or development is considered rationally.

I really like people who can do both drama and comedy and not some like middle of the road do both drama and comedy. I'm not talking about some guy who does these bland dramedies all the time. I'm talking about people that have done heavy drama and who have done heavy comedy.

I love Groot so much I get teary eyed when I think of him sometimes. Essentially, all the Guardians start out the movie as bastards - except Groot. He’s an innocent. He’s a hundred percent deadly and a hundred percent sweet. He’s caught up in Rocket’s life, really.

It's definitely not the character who it is in the comics, I'll say that much.

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.

We live in a world where everybody's supposed to be cool and act tough and put up fronts, and everybody is so cynical.

My brain has always been wired in such a way that I'd rather communicate to a smaller audience who really get turned on by what I do than meet a wider audience and give them milk.

God giving man life and taking it away is not nearly so bad as God taking away childhood and giving him life.

I think whatever is going on with my brain, I'm very, very - and I'm not saying this as a positive thing, it's just a fact - I'm very creative. I have a very strong imagination, and have since I was a little kid. That is where a lot of my world comes from. It's like I'm off somewhere else. And I can have a problem in life because of that, because I'm always off in some other world thinking about something else. It's constant.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's only stuff for sale.

[T]he one indispensable ingredient of science fiction [is] a belief in a world being changed by man's intellect, a conviction that what was being written could really happen.

I hope I'm still alive to see an expedition set off for Mars.

The people who gave up their humanity to save their planet was always very interesting to me.

Every movie I've ever made has just kind of come together.

Most of the complexity of the stories has developed as the stories came along (and may be a product of the principle that "nothing is what it seems"). I did start with some essential ambiguousness in the aliens' motivation and the questions this raises in human minds, which I consider to have been disregarded in Contact (novel and film). That, in part, may be what has delayed the writing of the fifth and sixth novelettes in the series.

One should be willing to throw away a dozen ideas to come up with a good one, just as one should throw away a dozen words to come up with the right one.

I don't really think in terms of competing with myself.

But if you, as an independent filmmaker or a "serious" filmmaker, think you put more love into your characters than the Russo Brothers do Captain America, or Joss Whedon does the Hulk, or I do a talking raccoon, you are simply mistaken.

I always like to think that I make movies that are like Nirvana songs. They have a slow verse and then they pop into high gear and then they go back into slow and then they pop into high gear again.

I don't really like movies that are all one or the other. It's really about the play between both of them. Now that I've said that, there's actually lots of movies that I like that are one or the other but it's just not for me as a filmmaker.

I like to plan everything out and know exactly what we're doing. It's always important to me to work with a cast and a crew that not only I respect their talent but I really like them as people.

What is my intention being a filmmaker? To make as much money as possible, or get as much attention as possible? It's not really either of those things. Now I can tell the stories that I want to tell.

Thinking that everything is going to come together in a perfect way is not necessarily the way it's going to happen.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with different planets in the solar system, and I used to create, for every single planet, a different alien race with a certain kind of pet, a certain kind of house, a certain kind of water system, and everything.