A Quote by Alex Stapleton

We need to take a step back and realize that what happened in the 1950s, when he started his career, is exactly where we are today. Everything goes in a cycle, and right now, distribution is changing. Audiences might be kind of sick of these giant blockbuster movies with all these special effects where blue people are running around and the hero is some non-human entity. These are all great movies, but I think that there's definitely room for new voices to come out.
I grew up loving films and making stupid movies with a good friend of mine, who now actually has a career in a really prominent special effects house, so he's still doing it. We just started messing around with a camera.
Everything comes back around. You never thought Louis Vuitton and Gucci and all that other stuff would come back. You know what I mean? And now it's one of the highest brands there is out. Everything just comes right back into circulation. Baggy jeans might come back out again. Might be a while, but they might.
My feeling about young people who want to pursue a career is - the first thing is do your homework on where it all started. Go back and look at history. Look at why the shows you are loving today happened and the artists you are listening to happened. And do your homework on history. Whether it's musical movies, musical plays, Broadway musical recordings - do your homework! And then, that way you will have an understanding of why, now, certain movies, certain plays, certain musicals are making some sort of sense.
There's this Indian fellow who worked out a cycle like the idea of stone-age, bronze-age, only he did it on an Indian one. The cycle goes from nothing until now and 20th century and then on and right around the cycle until the people are really grooving and then just sinks back into ignorance until it gets back into the beginning again. So the 20th century is a fraction of that cycle, and how many of those cycles has it done yet? It's done as many as you think and all these times it's been through exactly the same things, and it'll be this again.
If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago.
It's a tough time for screenwriters right now, because fewer movies are getting made. I'm enjoying television so much. It offers opportunities for writers to be in a writers' room and work their way up. It's somewhat easier because there's more of a community. There are so many screenwriters with incredible stories to tell, so I hope there will be some kind of shift in the business where very few types of movies are now made by the studios. There needs to be different budgets for different audiences; not everything having to be a huge opening weekend.
I think you realize the opportunities that we have and how special it is, that my kids are going to get to grow up being in an NFL locker room, kind of running around. I'm not trying to take any of this for granted because not many people get this opportunity. It's kind of cool that my boys are going to get the opportunity to be around this.
I think that television lately has been extremely dark and, in some ways, cynical but I also think that people who are writing those shows probably feel exactly as I do - that sometimes the darkness of a story can highlight the light in a story. There's a lot of cynical stuff but I think it may be even more in movies now where you see so many movies about cynical and corrupted characters. That's the state of many movies right now but movies, television, all of culture, there's always going to be a battle between the stories that are cynical and stories that are hopeful.
The genre of '80s action movies, I think, changed really when The Matrix came out and Keanu Reeves was able to perform kung fu. Then you had Matt Damon in the Bourne films, doing a great job. So it's different now, they can train actors to do their own fights convincingly on screen, so those guys aren't needed anymore. But I think everything goes around in circles; people still do want to see the guys that can do stuff for real, that's why The Expendables is so popular. I think it will come back again.
I think it's just as viable a way of telling a story as anything else but for right now we like playing around with the new ways to do 3-D because I think it's only going to get better. I think that eventually we'll come home, we'll sit in our living room and there will be a little hologram that'll pop up and you'll watch these 3-D movies but you'll be able to walk around it.
The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.
I've had a relatively charmed life. I loved to be out in the city. New York was my town. I've had people come up to me and say, 'You're a great New Yorker. You've given your time and money to so many New York charities. You're a great supporter of the arts. I like some of your movies - and some of your movies suck, actually.'
I don't even know why, but my entire career is contemporary films. Entire career! There's no period movies - there's one - but there's no period movies, no special effects movies. I just do character studies and so, some of them are gonna bump into each other, but I love the challenge, with a good script. I love the challenge of playing not a very pleasant or attractive character that seduces an audience or wins an audience over by the end.
Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful -- our own innocence.
I guess that’s the thing about a hero’s journey. You might not start out a hero, and you might not even come back that way. But you change, which is the same as everything changing. The journey changes you, whether or not you know it, and whether or not you want it to.
Listen, I think movies serve many different purposes, from those movies that are frivolous and just an entertainment, to movies that just go to exploring the complexities of the human soul. Everything is valid if it's done with honesty and dignity, and I actually do both of those types of movies in my career.
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