A Quote by John Heard

There were a lot of things in it that were important at the time to me. Cutter's Way movie was very relevant. And I wanted Cutter to succeed as a vet, as a guy coming back from 'Nam, because there were so many guys like that. And there were so many other movies at the time, like Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, and The Deer Hunter, that it was really important that the movie be believable, that I come across a pissed-off vet who'd been there and comes home angry.
Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.
There were many books in my parents' home. I'm from a family of five children and we were all readers. And so by the time I left home, I had already read many books, and I was very interested in reading more. That was when I started to have the desire to write. But it wasn't like a divine apparition with angels and seraphins on high. Not for me, at least.
Well, this movie I've been working on for a while. I had the idea for the movie like twenty years ago when I was doing 'Empire of the Sun' in 1987 because at that time that's when all these Vietnam movies were being made and my friends and I were going on auditions for these Vietnam movies and my friends were getting them and going away to fake boot camps.
Pete Townsend for me was a huge influence. Because essentially they were a three-piece band and the way he structured his chords and took up a lot of space musically in the songs was really important to the way Rush developed. Geddy and Neil both were such active players and lot of the time we were all playing like crazy and it was too much and somebody had to reel it in and me being the faceless guy, I would do that.
Pretty early on in making the first movie I realized that this is what I wanted to do. I felt like by that time I just found my niche, like this is what I was supposed to be doing. So I completely submerged myself into the world of watching movies, making my own movies, buying video cameras and lights. When I wasn't making a movie, I was making my own movies. When I wasn't making movies, I was watching movies. I was going back and studying film and looking back at guys that were perceived as great guys that I can identify with. It just became my life.
Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon.
I think people were not expecting us [with Robert Ben Garant] to, they were just like, "Well here come the writers," but we both were coming out of a sketch comedy background, so when we pitch a movie, we play every character in the film. You act it out, you perform it - you do a 10-minute performance of the movie.
In the '60s and '70s it was a great period for American films because studios were still run by individuals who worked off the seat of their pants and went along with things. At that time, they were very uncertain about what to make because of the influence of television. A lot of really terrific movies were made. But then the studios gradually became more corporate and were owned by corporations and run in that way and now they're very nervous. You see what they make - sequels, franchises and try not to take risks.
There were a lot of teen stars that were very cookie-cutter... I'm just being me.
What I wanted to do was put a woman of color, front and center, in my movie combining a lot of themes that were relevant to both men and women. I actively wanted her to carry the weight of this movie because I'm a woman. And I actively wanted to explore many of the issues that affected her as a woman of color. That was very important to me. And although these issues affect some women of color, I don't think they're only of interest to women of color. They're of universal interest.
The whole first movie [Twilight] was pretty fun. I had never really done a movie like it, when there's such a big cast of people that are around about the same age. Everyone didn't really know what was going to happen with the movie, but there was a good energy. There was something which people were fighting for, in a way. They wanted it to be something special. None of us were really known then, as well. It felt like a big deal, at the time.
I really don't like to do back-to-back movies. I concentrate on things at home. My family and school life are important to me. I try to do one movie a year.
I always had an affinity for older people. I had a job delivering newspapers, and one place I had to go was an old people's home. Some people would introduce you to their neighbors as if you were a nephew or grandson. They didn't get many visitors, so they acted like you were coming to see them. And that stuck with me for a long time.
Hollywood was possible for a while! Why didn't I go along with it? Well, the other things that were pulling me back were more important. Being at home, being in the same marriage, these things enabled me to go off and travel in the first place.
When I was a kid, I was watching the movies my parents wanted to watch. I came from a working class family, not specifically educated, so we were watching popular movies. My dad liked cowboy movies, so we were watching cowboy movies. Some of them were amazing. It’s a genre of movie I like very much.
I like the idea of sitting in a theater with a bunch of people. With technology now, people are getting more and more isolated. I like the community coming around the story. You don't have that with a DVD. People go home, they're tired from work, they can turn it off. It doesn't make you commit the same way, if you can control the movie. More difficult movies, it's too easy to turn them off. All the time, I see movies I know if I had seen it on DVD, I wouldn't have hung with it. If you see it on the screen, you hang with it and it pays off better than a movie you can easily sit through on DVD.
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