A Quote by Andrew Sarris
Movies are as old as psychoanalysis. So if I were to put you or anyone else on a couch and say, 'Tell me your favorite movies,' it would be a way of psychoanalyzing you.
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We were film geeks. We devoured everything: really obscure art films, foreign films. We were the kind of guys that lived at the Cinematheque. But at the end of the day, your favorite movies are like everybody else's favorite movies. Because those are the movies that become a touch point where you can connect to other people.
They allow us to disrespect our Black woman. A lot of these things would be considered criminal if it were to be carried out in the streets. That's like when they tell you after you buy your VHS and you rent movies they tell you not to copy the movies.
The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.
Scary movies are one of my favorite movies to watch and I've loved scary movies since I was like three years old.
If I wanted to do TV full-time, 'Breaking Bad' is definitely the type of project I would want to do. But TV is not my favorite thing in the world. I definitely want to focus on film. It's what I grew up loving. It's always been about movies, movies, movies, movies, movies. I really want to make great films.
I did two movies that were arthouse movies; they were critically successful but made no money at all... but after making those movies, I thought, 'I wouldn't watch my own movies when I was 16, and my buddies where I came from wouldn't watch my movies, because they were boring.'
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.
I grew up on certain movies, particular movies that said something to me as a kid from Missouri, movies that showed me places I'd yet traveled, or different cultures, or explained something, or said something in a better way than I could ever say. I wanted to find the movies like that.
The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.
Let's say you would see me in a lot more big movies had I done movies that I'd been asked to do playing bad guys. Now that I have a child on the way, I think that you'll probably be seeing me play more bad guys. If that's what's going to put bread on the table, that's what I'm going to be doing.
My uncle Claude was my favorite uncle he was also my godfather. He and I were really, really close. He used to take me to see cowboy movies all the time when I was a little boy because I loved cowboy movies. He got a cowboy name for me, which was Smokey Joe. So from the time I was three years old if people asked me what my name was I didn't tell them my name was William, I told them my name was Smokey Joe.
All those years I had been making movies because I loved movies, and that's what made all the difference. If you're doing it because you love it you can succeed because you'll work harder than anyone else around you, take on challenges no one else would dare take, and come up with methods no one else would discover, especially when their prime drive is fame and fortune. All that will follow later if you really love what you do. Because your work will speak itself.
There are movies that require fantasy and slightly more fantastical acting. Lines that are good for certain movies, in real life circumstances, would be absolutely unbelievable things to really say, and you would look at these people like they're freaks for conversing that way. But somehow for certain styles of movies, it works, and it seems fine.
I've always had a thing for old movies, old Hollywood. I've always just loved watching Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo. In all of those old movies from the '40s and '50s, women put themselves together so well, with a little bit of drama and elegance. That was fascinating to me growing up.
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 think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.
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