A Quote by Wesley Morris
There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.
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If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way. I don't look at American History X as a failure, or Fight Club as a failure, or 25th Hour as a failure, or Larry Flynt as a failure, or any of the movies that I care about that I've made that were not immediately successful. I'll stand with those movies any day over 90 percent of the movies that came out at the same time that made a hundred million dollars
The thing that is incredibly helpful is that we screen the movies and we ask the audience if they like it or not and we ask a lot of questions and do testing on the movies. For comedies, at least, it's very helpful. If they're not laughing and they don't say that they loved it, then I have screwed up.
Movies take a lot of time to make, so when I sign onto a project, I ask, do I want to dedicate a lot of time to this world? And more so, I look at what I need for me. Do I want to make a comedy? Do I want to make a drama? What do I need? Am I in the right headspace to do this role? And then politics come into consideration, too.
If you are going to have a risk-taking culture, you can't really look at every failure as a failure, you've got to be able to look at the failure as a learning opportunity.
I was a barfly, so going to work and acting and rehearsing and then going and sitting in a bar and drinking and then going home was sort of my lifestyle. And there was none of that out here in the '70s when I was lucky enough to get movies, and nobody else that I knew was working in movies at that point. I didn't really have a lot of movie friends.
Our Pavlovian response to movies has gotten to its lowest point ever. You look at a lot of movies that are successful and a lot of movies that studios hold up as examples and you go, 'My God, that isn't even a story. It isn't even two acts. It's eight set pieces drawn out with slow motion.' The difficulty for me was that you had to hope that people were interested in this kind of a story.
A lot of 3D movies have so much on the screen that you almost don't know where to look.
Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.
The world is a total mess. Take a look at what's happening with Aleppo. Take a look what's happening in Mosul. Take a look what's going on in the Middle East. And people are fleeing and they're going into Europe and all over the place. The world is a mess.
Things are going great in every part of my life except movies. That's okay. I've got a lot of other parts of my life. I've made 15 movies. You can see any one of my movies and it says the same thing.
I like zombie movies, and I like genre movies a lot. To watch. Less so to make, I think. But I grew up on that stuff. I would just grow up watching a lot of horror movies, a lot of slasher movies and then zombie movies.
On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they're listening to what you're saying, you're off the screen.
I look at movies, unfortunately, and I still see a lot of movies [lacking diversity].
There is a pressure to look good always and look your best. But I think it is important to feel normal sometimes. Because people look up to us and they should also know we are normal. So, it is ok to have an off day.
Most filmmakers' entire body of knowledge is of other movies. When they describe things, they describe them in relation to other movies. That's why we have so many cyclical movies that look like other movies. But I'm not cynical. I even go to some of those movies.
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.
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