Quotes & Sayings About Hollywood Films

[Hollywood] studios are handing out money to make independent films now, but they all want the same thing. They want the style and the deadpan delivery of RESERVOIR DOGS or FARGO and so they imitate those movies. They want PULP FICTION, but they get it all wrong! They get the detachment, but that's it. And then it's all about style, and in the end what do you learn about the characters? Nothing. You learn you wasted two hours. — Stanley Tucci

When I was making my first films, I was very interested in Hollywood B movies. — Park Chan-wook

So, no, I'm not trying to crack into Hollywood, although I'll make films there if they're good scripts. — Ewan McGregor

Even as a child, when kids my age would watch cartoons, I preferred watching horror flicks. I had watched some Hollywood horror flicks and even films made by the Ramsay brothers by the time I was six! I have always been biased towards that genre. — Emraan Hashmi

I am a hybrid. I do independent films and also do Hollywood films - I love them both. — Spike Lee

I know, that trends and all of those things and formulae that calculate what audiences want to see and what audiences don't want to see and various other demographic demarcations are the eccentric and ludicrous prerogative of Hollywood studios. But out there in the real world - by which I mean the rest of the world where we make truthful organic films, independent films unimpeded by interference - it's not about all those sort of calculating what is commercial. It's about wanting to say things and saying them in a way that will get through to people. — Mike Leigh

There's a huge interest in the Chinese market, and Hollywood has a huge interest in the Chinese market with films like 'Transformers' making more money over there than here. — Daniel Wu

And the problem was that there was a positive epidemic of narcissism, encouraged by commercial manipulation and by the shallow values of Hollywood films. And interestingly enough, the real growth area was male narcissism. — Alexander McCall Smith

Kahneman's evidence shows that we suck at remembering and predicting our own well-being. We as a culture still ignore this empirical evidence, recommending to live our lives so as to avoid deathbed regrets. Deathbed regrets are like Hollywood films: they stir passions for a couple hours, but are poorly connected to reality. They are not good criteria for a well-lived life. — Nick Winter

A lot of Hollywood films tend to be bloated, bombastic, loud. At the same time, I do like the infrastructure of making a blockbuster; it's like having a big train set. — David Yates

When I first came to Hollywood, I used to dream of doing films and escaping television. — Billy Campbell

I think I have always tried to do the smaller films. I like to jump around and there is something really nice for acting in a smaller film. But I think now, Hollywood's movies certainly involve a younger generation for the most part and so ... I love going back and forth. — Sigourney Weaver

I usually play character parts in Hollywood films. — Parker Posey

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films. — Ken Burns

I'm not trying to be self-serving, but you know, you get to Hollywood, and if you want to make something big and loud and dumb, it's pretty easy. It's very hard to go down there and make a film like 'Sideways,' which I thought was a great film. They don't want to make films like that anymore, even though that film was very successful. — Terry Zwigoff

'Sunset Boulevard' - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties. — Manny Farber

Once upon a time, I wrote a book. People seemed to dig it, so I wrote another and one after that. That's when Hollywood came knocking at my back door. As soon as I cashed that check, I wrapped my lips around the mighty erection that is the film industry and sucked hard, just like a good whore should. Unfortunately, I had to be taught not to orphan the balls. — Hank Moody

I have seen so few films in which the sex felt really respected by the filmmaker. Hollywood too often shies away from it or makes adolescent jokes about it ... Sex is only connected to the negative because people are scared of it. — John Cameron Mitchell

As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making. — Harold Ramis

Most of Hollywood is about making money - and I love money, but I don't make the films thinking about money. — David Lynch

The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost. — Roger Ebert

Hollywood ... that's not going to be my niche at all. If anyone is going wants to work with me, I would think it's going to be independent films. I'm not 22! — Lesley Manville

Well into the '40s, it wasn't uncommon for big-budget Hollywood movies to contain little or no underscoring, and many of today's directors, following the lead of Martin Scorsese in 'GoodFellas,' accompany their films with pop records, not original music. — Terry Teachout

I was very young, maybe five. The opera was very ... I was attracted to opera to the point that I think it's the reason I started to write music for films. I never studied. There are film and music school that teach you how to write music. I never studied that. But the influence of opera, which is a combination of storyline, visuals, staging, plus music ... that was perhaps the best school I could have had. That's what gave me the idea of coming to Hollywood to write music for films. — Lalo Schifrin

The collective sign of relief heaved on V-J Day ought to have inspired Hollywood to release a flood of "happily ever after" films. But some victors didn't feel too good about their spoils. They'd seen too much by then. Too much warfare, too much poverty, too much greed, all in the service of rapacious progress. A bundle of unfinished business lingered from the Depression - nagging questions about ingrained venality, mean human nature, and the way unchecked urban growth threw society dangerously out of whack. Writers and directors responded by delivering gritty, bitter dramas that slapped our romantic illusions in the face and put the boot to the throat of the smug bourgeoisie. Still, plenty of us took it - and liked it. — Eddie Muller

Islamism demanded no less of a root-and-branch overhaul of society. But because it was cloaked in religious garb, no one quite knew what to do with it, and people were desperate not to offend. There was confusion over whether to define our activism as a cultural identity, an ideology or a faith. To top it off, Islamism went through a decade of being embraced by both the left and right wings. The default left-leaning liberal position was to embrace the movement as part of multicultural sensitivity: to tell people to stop practising their faith was imperialism in nineties clothing, a colonial hangover bordering on racism. Instead, we were embraced as a new generation of anti-colonial politicised youth. Curiously, the default position on the right was to embrace us too, because it had been the Afghan Mujahideen, backed by the CIA, who fought the Soviet Union. Lest we forget, this was when Hollywood films such as Stallone's Rambo 3 portrayed the Afghan Mujahideen as heroes. — Maajid Nawaz

Hollywood is still the cradle of many myths, including the one of eternal youth. I find it odd that the very notion of desire, when applied to a woman over 40, is turned into a pathology or a mockery in a number of films. But Hollywood is not the only place to blame, by far. This is just a rendition, possibly magnified by the power of movies, of a general state of things, social, cultural and political. — Anne Fontaine

Film is universal. All the countries of the world are making films. Hollywood is the only major unsubsidized center for films. To my knowledge all others are at least partially subsidized. I'm glad Hollywood isn't. — Frank Capra

Blonde movie stars in the 1950s seem to have been pretty much divided between breathy bombshells (Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield) and slim, elegant swans (Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint). Producers didn't really know what to do with Judy Holliday, a brilliant, versatile actress who simply didn't fit into any easy category. Though she left behind a handful of delightful films, one can't help feeling a sense of waste that her gifts were not better handled by Hollywood (or, for that matter, by Broadway). Perhaps, like Lucille Ball, Judy Holliday would have blossomed with a really good sitcom; but, unlike Lucy, she never got one. — Eve Golden

In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for. — Will Self

I don't have an anti-Hollywood feeling. It's just I'm a New Zealander. I was born in New Zealand, and it's where my house is, and my family goes to school there. My interest is to remain in my homeland and make films. I don't really want to relocate myself to other countries in the world to work. — Peter Jackson

When people used to ask me why I got involved with Hollywood films, I would say jokingly that it was for the health insurance. — Spalding Gray

Artist Matthew Barney has made a film about "shit". It is hardly original. Hollywood has made shit films for decades. — Dean Cavanagh

The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out ... Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions. — E.L. Doctorow

You don't see Indians in Hollywood films around which a story can revolve. As soon as we have a social presence in your society, I am sure there will be many actors from our part of the world that will be acting in Hollywood films. — Amitabh Bachchan

There was a golden era in film-making in Hollywood back in the 1970s, and although there is some great independent film-making in America, it's actually very hard to get independent films made in the United States. It's much more feasible from Europe. — Lenny Abrahamson

Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me ... aren't you? — Dustin Hoffman

Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there's a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They're forgetting the fact that there's a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing. — Clint Eastwood

Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me. — Bruno Dumont

There's a thing that happens in Hollywood, when you hand in a script with magic in it, and the people at the studio who read it say "We don't quite understand ... can you explain the rules? What are the rules here? The magic must have rules" and sometimes when they say that to me I explain that I am sure it does, just as life has rules, but they didn't give me a rule book to life when I was born, and I've been trying to figure it out as I go along, and I am sure it is the same thing for magic; and sometimes I explain that, yes, the magic has rules, and if they read again carefully they can figure out what they are; and sometimes I sigh and put in a line here and a line there that spells things out, says, YES THESE ARE THE RULES YOU DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION and then everyone is very happy. — Neil Gaiman

But Hollywood cinema remains profoundly conservative, profoundly stupid, and often painful. About one out of every ten films is okay, meaning a little bit better than the average. — T. Jefferson Kline

At Universal Studios, Marston had a hand in films like Show Boat, in 1929. He also helped get films past the censors, including All Quiet on the Western Front, in 1930. When Carl Laemmle's son, Junior Laemmle, took over Universal, he turned it into a specialty shop for horror films: Marston's theory of emotions lies behind the particular brand of psychological terror in Laemmle's Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and The Invisible Man (1933). Before Marston left Hollywood, he also worked for Paramount. For Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), he tested audience reaction by strapping viewers to blood pressure cuffs while they watched the rushes.30 — Jill Lepore

I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films. — Eli Roth

I heard, one of my producers told me this story where like the Hollywood studios brought all these high-end consultants in to try to figure out how to improve their process and make films more efficiently, and these consultants like studied the process for years and finally came up with this report they put together about how studios can improve the efficiency of their process, and the conclusion was have the script ready by the time you're shooting. — Joseph Kosinski

Even though I've done Hollywood films, I still don't think of myself as a Hollywood actress. — Ziyi Zhang

I was scouted at the age of 10 by a Hollywood agent. I was a really shy, geeky-looking thing, and started in the industry by doing 'extra' work on films. — Austin Butler

Films are made all over the world all the time and only a thin slice of that product is Hollywood. — Mike Leigh

Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance. I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on. — James Cagney

I'm not particularly interested in working with movie stars. It depends on where you come from, I suppose. Why are you making films? The reason I want make films is because they convey ideas. I think some directors make films because they want to hang out with movie stars and be part of Hollywood. They want to be a star themselves. — Neill Blomkamp

I'm a Hollywood kid, and I know that there are only so many stories. Only so many tales around the campfire that we have to tell. Then we have to regurgitate them. Our grandparents' movies were all remakes of silent films - we forget that, but it's true. — Robert Englund

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues that Brennan should have won awards for even better performances in To Have and Have Not (1944), My Darling Clementine (1946), Red River (1948), The Far Country (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959). Thomson counts no less than twenty-eight high caliber Brennan performances in still more films, including These Three (1936), Fury (1936), Meet John Doe (1941), and Bad Day At Black Rock (1955). Brennan worked with Hollywood's greatest directors - John Ford, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, King Vidor, and Fritz Lang - while also starring in Jean Renoir's Hollywood directorial debut, Swamp Water (1941). To discuss Brennan's greatest performances is also to comment on the work of Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, and many other stars. — Carl Rollyson

You can have ambiguity in television that you are not allowed in film ... at least in Hollywood studio films. — Richard LaGravenese

I do like musical films more than big Hollywood films, especially those by Jacques Demi and Vincent Minelli. — Park Chan-wook

The colonial films of the golden age of Hollywood were a clear proclamation of the Consensus historians' interpretation of the facts. These motion pictures encouraged audiences to believe that our nation could overcome all obstacles to its growth and defend itself against any future foreign aggression. — John P. Harty Jr.

But I think the thing I'm proud of about the film is that there aren't many films - either independent films or mainstream Hollywood films - that are like this; it's of its own times, and it's the film Mike Nichols wanted to make. — Patrick Marber

I very much enjoy my freedom creatively but I also would love to make one of those big Hollywood films that costs a lot of money and has a lot of people running around with cell phones and all that insanity. — Nicolas Winding Refn

I don't have a desire to make films that have cardboard cut-out or Hollywood stand-in replicas of humans. I need the real deal. — Lynn Shelton

Bad films gave me the courage to try making a movie — Stanley Kubrick

I never made films like kind of career moves, like making this film in order to make that film in order to end up in Hollywood. — Pawel Pawlikowski

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive. — Bharati Mukherjee

I always feel that crime films are about capitalism because it is a genre where it is perfectly acceptable for all the characters to be motivated by the desire for money. In some ways, the crime film is the most honest American film because it portrays Americans as I experience a lot of them, in Hollywood, as being very concerned with money. — Andrew Dominik

The script was classic Joe Eszterhas, intelligent, steamy and provocative. At one time, Eszterhas was Hollywood's highest paid writer, illiterate rock and roll bad boy whose 14 films glorified sex, drugsa nd cigarettes. Eszterhas also fought publicly with producers and politicians. In 1995 he argued that some of the misdeeds of the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations were more obscene than anything in an "R" rated movie. — David Shuster

From the moment I went to Hollywood for the first time, I was accused by various people of selling out. So I feel I've done my sell-out films already. I've sold everything! I've sold every piece of soul I ever had! — Beeban Kidron

I'm not always happy when Hollywood does remakes of films, but that's usually, when they have a very, very, very good film and they take away anything controversial from it and make flatter. — Stellan Skarsgard

Too often, you see film makers from other countries who have made interesting, original films, and then they come here and get homogenized into being hack Hollywood directors. I don't want to fall into that. — Peter Jackson

I think bad movies are made around the world, not just in Hollywood. There are as many bad art films in the whole world as there are bad commercial films. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Stanwyck was slim, and remained so over her career. Regardless of the obligations and pressures regarding size and shape for women in Hollywood, or her own needs and desires as an actress and a person, or the occasions within the films that show off her body, Stanwyck rarely advertises a superficial fantasy of feminine appearance. She is too busy exploring the subtlety of interactions. — Andrew Klevan

For many years, it was believed that the pyramids were created on the sweat, blood and tears of slaves (with Hollywood often portraying this notion in films) but instead, we now know that they were built by a specialized team of around 5000 permanent employees and aided by up to 20,000 men on a temporary basis. These temporary employees would provide labor and other skills for around four months before being sent home. The — Roman Collins

Well, I don't think Hollywood's a dirty word at all, I love a lot of Hollywood films. — David Nicholls

I was inspired by Maya Deren because she was the first woman filmmaker whose films I saw. I also loved Fellini and Goddard because they were so different from Hollywood films. But when I saw the cinema verite films that were made by Drew Associates with Leacock and Pennebaker I found my passion. — Chris Hegedus

People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn't really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look at it, but they are different things. — James Cameron

When I first got out to Hollywood, they were pushing me for sitcoms, and I didn't really have an interest in them. I wanted to do films and slowly worked that way. And then it became, I guess, this curse of the leading man. — Brad Pitt

Prior to 'Tokyo Drift,' the iconic perception of Asians in Hollywood films has been either the Kung Fu guy, the Yakuza guy or some technical genius. It used to be such a joke, to be laughed at rather than with. — Sung Kang

I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films. — Khaled Hosseini

greatest films ever made originate largely in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s - a period when Hollywood worked — Ben Shapiro

Mostly I do films that mainstream Hollywood wouldn't touch. — Jason Patric

The horror movie will not go away. Look at the change in the Hollywood landscape as a signifier of its durability. At one point it was just one of many styles of films called 'product' that between, say, 1930 and 1970, the movie city ground out like sausages or hula hoops at a rate of four or five a week. — Stephen Hunter

I was in Hollywood. It's the mythology heart. It's where all the European films came in the '30s and '40s. The marriage between Europe and Hollywood has always been the best when it works. — Nicolas Winding Refn

We created Pure Flix to make uplifting and inspiring content on a consistent, ongoing basis, so audiences would truly have an alternative to what Hollywood puts out. Pure Flix produces faith and family films, so the audience is the entire family. — David A.R. White

Independent films are where you really get to cut your teeth and have some fun and do the things that mainstream Hollywood doesn't want to do. — Anthony Anderson

The nice thing about building up your own studio is if Hollywood decides to hate faith-based films, it doesn't matter to us. We have an audience and continue to serve that audience. — David A.R. White

To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder. — George Orwell

If you look at classic Hollywood films, they tend to shoot close-ups on quite long lenses and the background it out of focus. You know, it's just a mush. — Tom Hooper

I never know what my next move will be in Hollywood. It's such an unpredictable town. People get jaded and lost and I've been able to stay a float. I think the next logical step in my career would be to start my own filmmaking empire like (Harvey Weinstein) and (Bob Weinstein) did so many years ago. I think if only the unions weren't so strict in Boston, I'd set up shop there and make films of a certain quality you don't see represented these days. I'm full of ideas and dreams. — Ben Affleck

If two percent of all the films made in Hollywood are really artistically worthy - and I think it's a lot more than two percent - that's a pretty big percentage of things that will outlive their own generation. — Murray Horwitz

Some movies bring out the creativity in you. Every single audience member can become creative in the face of a particular movie. If you happen to like my films, it's because my films provide a bed for you on which you can find your creativity. The Hollywood movies do not provide that for you. — Abbas Kiarostami

I made my first film on 16mm. Then I began using 35mm.Then I began working in Hollywood. And I began to really understand how films were made by professionals. I have to say I wasn't very impressed. — Mike Figgis

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems. — Stan Brakhage

A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood. — Haile Gerima

Making African American films are hard in Hollywood. We need to rely on a support network and bring more cohesion to different filmmakers, actors, producers etc. It's a very difficult business. There aren't a lot of Africans Americans or people of color in high positions in Hollywood that we can green-light films. — Paula Patton

Many of us had this idea of doing independent film, of making personal, relevant films, as opposed to Hollywood fluff. I directed a few. — Robert Kane Pappas

English is my second language, but in Hong Kong, they don't know that I'm from China. They think I'm from Hollywood because all the films they see are from here. China and Hong Kong are very different places, but they're starting to merge. Still the culture is very different. — Bai Ling

Throughout the movies' golden age, the Western enriched Hollywood financially and artistically. But in the 1970s, the genre lost its audience appeal to fantasy films of the 'Star Wars' stripe, which told more or less the same story - elemental animosities leading to an armed showdown - but at a faster tempo, and in outer space. — Richard Corliss

Hollywood is, I always argue, has a great track record of making good films. — Murray Horwitz

Hollywood is a wonderful machine for making big movies. In France, we make smaller and more personal films, but if things keep changing, this will disappear. The industry in Italy is practically gone. Cinecitta now is used mostly by filmmakers from others places, like Martin Scorsese. — Ludivine Sagnier

I don't think the idea of working in Hollywood really exists anymore. I think you work in films, and where the film is shot is where it's shot. The studio system doesn't really exist. — Rupert Friend

The films that I go to see at the cinema are not Hollywood blockbusters particularly. I've not got anything against them ... I'm in them! But I don't go and spend my money on them. — Gemma Arterton

One aspect of my mum's personality that has influenced me is her love of Hollywood and the golden era of black-and-white films. — Rebecca Hall

It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind. — Naveen Andrews

It was no accident that I made 'Hoop Dreams' because it concerned a sport that I loved and hoped would be my dream, however far-fetched that turned out to be. Because of the success of that film, Hollywood pigeonholed me as a sports biopic guy, which led to 'Prefontaine' and two cable sports films. — Steve James