Philosophical Sayings

Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character.

I think every movie is a genre movie. A John Cassavetes movie is a genre movie—it's a John Cassavetes Movie. That's a genre in and of itself.

I don't believe at all in test screenings or sneak previews where you hand out questionnaires to the viewers to get their reactions.

You know, anything can be- you can make a joke out of anything. You name me any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it, all right, because you know, and a joke is a joke.

Violence was like another character in the room. It hung over the proceedings. You kept waiting for every conversation to break out into it. So even if it was funny, the audience might have laughed, but when they get out of the theater, they don't re…

I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages.

The worst thing about movies is, no matter how far you can go, when it comes to violence you are wearing a pair of handcuffs that novelists... don't wear.

Once the movie gets going, once the lights go down, you become a collective. There's you by yourself, but then there's all of you together. And then you start appreciating the movie in that way.

We don't tell a story. We tell a situation. Most of the movies that you see nowadays... you pretty much know everything you're going to see in the movie by the first 10 or 20 minutes. Now, that's not a story. A story is something that constantly unfo…

It's not that I'm on this big crusade against linear storytelling, but the thing is it's not the only game in town. A novel can do that no problem. Novelist have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And th…

There are two kinds of violence. First, there's cartoon violence like Lethal Weapon. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not ragging on that. But my kind of violence is tougher, rougher, more disturbing. It gets under your skin.

I get a kick out of violence in movies. I don't get a kick out of badly done violence or action scenes in movies. It's like, 'How far is too far?' Well, if they do it well, there shouldn't be, 'How far is too far?'

Social critics don't mean a thing to me. It's really easy to ignore them, because I believe in what I'm doing 100%. So any naysayers for the public good can just fuck off.

If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can't help but make a good movie. You don't have to go to school, you don't have to know a lens... none of that shit's important.

To me they're all living inside of this one universe. And it isn't [pointing out the window] out there. Well, it's a little bit out there, and it's also there, too [points at his TV], in the movies, and it's also in here [points to his head]. It's al…

I just realized that I need to be a director for two reasons. One, directors were already my heroes at this point. I wanted to - when I wanted to be an actor I wanted to work with this director. Not work with this actor, I wanted to work for this dir…

I didn't start a family until late in life. I've been -- I've always kind of equated -- if you're doing movies on, you know, on the level that I've been doing, actually at the level I've been allowed to do, it's -- I equate it to mountain climbing.

When I start writing I write these crazy novels. And I don't know what to do about it. Well, write a novel. That's what you can do, write a novel. And don't make a movie out of it.

When a man of principle battles a scoundrel, the scoundrel always at first has the upper hand. Because there are some things the man of principle won't do.

Most of it should be subconscious, if the work is coming from a special place. If I'm thinking and maneuvering that pen around, then that's me doing it. I really should let the characters take it. But the characters are different facets of me, or may…