Movie Genre Quotes & Sayings

What I truly get excited about is not the genre of a movie or the size of a part - it's character. I like to find characters. — William Fichtner

As a viewer, I never want any movie ruined for me, no matter what the genre is. — Drew Goddard

People who work in horror know they are contributing to a genre that has always been loved and will always be loved - privately. It's the forbidden evil working behind the curtain. My job scoring a horror movie is like being the barker at a carnival. A good barker can get anyone to walk into the roped-off tent. — Christopher Young

What I'd really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. — Mindy Kaling

I always stay in the urban comedy genre because it just never gets old. It's one of those things that people watch, again and again. This is that kind of movie. It gives you longevity. — Terry Crews

People are often wary of reading or watching anything in the horror genre because in their minds, it's just senseless gore, death and violence. Well, I can tell you from avid experience, that's not what horror is about. The horror genre teaches us that sometimes really bad things happen to really good people, but that hope always prevails in even the darkest of situations. That's a very important lesson, no matter how frightening you think the teacher is, and to be in the top of her class, all you need to do is to go in with an open mind. — Rebecca McNutt

I think movies should illuminate and teach, but that's for a certain genre. — Jordana Brewster

I'd love to do a Paul Greengrass movie, or something like that, that's a character-driven action film. I'd like someone to make me go to the gym every day, and all that stuff. I don't know. Wherever the good characters are, I tend to try to get a job. It was nice because this was dipping my toe in the action genre. Maybe I might put my foot in, next time. — Carey Mulligan

I love to get involved with projects that take me out of my comfort zone. I try to do things that are not necessarily what I'm used to. I always wanted to do a big animation movie and stick to the codes that this genre sometimes implies. — Gustavo Santaolalla

I just adored 'Shaun Of The Dead.' That's a true mashup. That's a real Romero-era zombie movie and a real Gen X indie comedy. That was before zombie movies were cool, before 'Zombieland' and 'I Am Legend,' and now it has become a whole sub-genre. — Jon Favreau

I'm not a fan of any genre but am a fan of movies that are intelligent and/or funny. That goes across all genres: a horror movie, a zombie movie, alien invaders, chick flick, or raunchy comedy. If it's well done, I'm a fan. — J.K. Simmons

Our fathers were actually business partners in the same real-estate firm, and we got together and thought, How can we get a movie together and get distribution and create a new movie genre? We started by making satires of commercials. — David Zucker

I am a movie fan across the board, though, so if a movie is well done then I love it and it does not really matter what the genre is. — Tania Raymonde

The spy genre is something which, as a fan of movies, a movie geek myself, I just love that cinematic joy that they bring. — Pierce Brosnan

Snack consumption was legal but Joe expected anyone dining on the distracting shit to synchronize chewing with car chases and shootouts regardless of the genre. The Popcorn Pig was treating the space like a pie eating contest. The buttery snack was his instrument and he was doing a sound check with the venue's acoustics. — Michael Ebner

I think a good movie is a good movie whether that falls into a genre or not. — Nicolas Cage

I do genre films because I like them or because I need the money. I make a star's salary when I do horror because I can still open a movie in Italy or Spain or Germany. — Robert Englund

According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.
But this is the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive, but not alive enough.
I wiped his chin and grabbed his face in my hands and knelt down close to him so that I could see his eyes, which still lived. 'I'm sorry. I wish it was like that movie, with the Persians and the Spartans.'
'Me too,' he said.
'But it isn't,' I said.
'I know,' he said.
'There are no bad guys.'
'Yeah.'
'Even cancer isn't a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive. — John Green

On the first movie we got good reviews, but we were still dealing with genre stuff. It's going away. Judge the movie - is it a good one or a bad one? We know we made a great movie and it's being judged for just being a good film. — Avi Arad

It may be a mistake to say this, but I know my limitations as an actor and I know what I can and can not do. Robert De Niro can do everything. I can't. A 'Highlander' movie is basically my thing. What I'm attempting to do is develop my ability as an actor and try to be the best I can be in the fantasy/action genre. — Christopher Lambert

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character. — Ethan Hawke

My dad was on 'Zombieland,' and I love that movie. So yeah, I think I like the horror genre! — Chandler Riggs

The action genre is kind of designed for a young male audience. But we found on 'The Matrix' that we hit the Valhalla of movie making, which is the four quadrant audience - the young male audience, the older male audience, the young female audience and the older female audience. — Joel Silver

The thing that makes a great genre movie is one that's not just entertainment, not just horror or sci-fi or whatever. The ones I love are the genre pictures with some subversive message underlying it all. — Ethan Hawke

I'm a huge fan of horror. I can't handle all the blood and gore, but that's what The Following was meant to be. It was meant to be a genre show, a little movie, a little scary genre film every week. That was our goal. That's what Kevin Bacon and I wanted to do. — Kevin D. Williamson

The American independent cinema is as formulaic as Hollywood and one genre is what you might call the 'inaction movie'. The setting is invariably a decaying town in a regional backwater where a catalytic stranger or returning native meets up with a group of sad, eccentric outsiders. — Philip French

A movie is a certain thing by definition. There's nothing wrong with knocking out a good genre picture. — David Ayer

At the end of the day, I like the spy genre, as opposed to the action movie genre, because spies are smart. The successful spies are the smarter spies. — Doug Liman

My agent called and said, 'How do you feel about a pirate movie? I mean, how often are you going to get that call? It's sort of the singularly most failed genre of our time, but I thought it had to be attempted one more time. I think there's something rebellious about pirates, something revolutionary about them. They came out of a time when things were oppressive; you could get hung for stealing a loaf of bread. For me, the Pirates films are about when it's right to break the rules to achieve what you want. — Gore Verbinski

I am completely open to doing a romantic comedy, but I will never do something just for the sake of doing a specific genre or because it's the time or place to do a different type of movie. I think that would be a huge mistake. — Leonardo DiCaprio

'Comic book' has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call 'Die Hard' a 'comic-book movie,' when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told. — Frank Miller

I usually just pick a genre of movie that I feel like saluting and then go off and come up with something that I can sort of pay homage to. That's the great thing about our show is we've sort of created a landscape for 'Psych' where we're kind of allowed to go off and give shout-outs to movies that we love, genres that we love. — James Roday

I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie. — Quentin Tarantino

A Bond movie falls into a specific genre, and you have to provide certain elements. You must respect the fact it's essentially about girls, guns, gadgets, and big action. — Lee Tamahori

Genres give a vocabulary. They give a frame of reference for the audience to enter into a movie. Then, once they have their footing, that's when you can start doing things that they don't expect. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Good genre movies are a little bit like trying to write a haiku. There are certain things that you have to do to fulfill the audience's expectations, but inside that, you have complete freedom to talk about whatever you want. Who wants to see a movie about gun violence in America and class? But, if you set it in this terrifying, fun, roller coaster ride of a movie, you can talk about whatever you want. That's been the game that genre movies play, when they do it well. — Ethan Hawke

Write the kind of movie you would want to see, in a genre you love. — Douglas Wood

'Black film,' that term allows studios to just marginalize a movie and say, 'We've made our black film. We've made our film with people of color in it,' as opposed to, 'I just feel like people of color should be in every genre.' — Gina Prince-Bythewood

I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another. — Quentin Tarantino

In the horror genre, unfortunately you sometimes have the studio tell you, "No, go with more unknown people because it's a scary movie," and I disagree. — Alexandre Aja

The first thing I ever thought of when I thought of Buffy , the movie, was the little ... blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed, in every horror movie. The idea of Buffy was to subvert that idea, that image, and create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim. That element of surprise ... genre-busting is very much at the heart of both the movie and the series. — Joss Whedon

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. — Olivier Martinez

I love a good harsh horror movie, when it's done well. But there are times when it feels cynical. You can tell when a filmmaker loves the genre, and you can tell when someone's just cashing in a paycheck. Then it becomes a dumbing down - a fetishisation of violence that I react very strongly against. — Drew Goddard

I'm a big movie fan, and I want to make movies in every genre. I want to make my romantic comedy one day. — James Wan

I always wanted to do a movie that deals with America's horrific past with slavery, but the way I wanted to deal with it is - as opposed to doing it as a huge historical movie with a capital H - I thought it could be better if it was wrapped up in genre. — Quentin Tarantino

I would agree 'Paul' is a sci-fi genre movie. And a road movie. — Nick Frost

To AMC's credit, I think what they saw was the show doesn't exist in the marketplace. They knew that there was a hunger for a martial arts show. They also knew that you have this strong tradition of martial arts cinema, so even though it's not branded by a novel or a comic book or an old movie or something, we do have the genre itself, which people love. — Alfred Gough

How to make a scary movie human, take a movie like Sinister. How can I make that guy so real so that the scary elements of it are more scary and it functions as a genre movie - as the way it's supposed to, you want to hear a ghost story at midnight, that's a good one - but how do you fill it up with humanity inside, in staying true to the genre? You know? Does that make sense? — Ethan Hawke

Really interesting genre films, especially monster movies, evoke the fears of the times intentionally. Our starting point was 'Godzilla' - the original movie was released less than 10 years after Hiroshima, and it's a classic in Japan. — Matt Reeves

The good thing of TV movies/books... TV series... audiobooks is that you can choose the genre and you have plenty of choice. — Deyth Banger

Looking back, it's funny how the lighter family-friendly version of these classic Universal movie monsters that were satirized in The Munsters seduced me like a gateway drug into the genre. — Bryan Fuller

Well, you always worry about being pin holed. I haven't been yet. You always worry about that, no matter which genre you do. Luckily for me so far, every time I've done a movie it's been a completely different genre. — Sylvain White

I can tell you as a fact that if you'd asked anyone in Hollywood one year before 'Pirates of the Caribbean' had come out, they'd have told you the pirate movie was a dead genre. And it's not that it's a dead genre. If you make a bad pirate movie, no one will want to see it. If you make a good one, everyone will want to see it. — Dean Devlin

The main trend with the theme episodes is that anywhere there is a misconception about the way the physical world works, we're finding fertile material. Whether it's in a phrase like "going over like a lead balloon" or "a needle in a haystack," or tackling movie myths or even a genre, like MacGyver or James Bond, we're finding that all these things can lead to people believing the world works in a certain way. It might not be correct, but we can test out if it's true. — Adam Savage

Star Wars, the original movie, was all the various old genre of pictures: the swashbucklers, the war movies, all those things were put n there in a different look. — Bruce Boxleitner

It's difficult to do a genre film well, and it doesn't matter if you're talking vampire movies or 'Dawn of the Dead' or 'The Thing' or 'Escape From New York.' Those kind of movies, they understand what the old-school B-movie is supposed to be, they get the throwback of it. — Ethan Hawke

I've never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong. — Roger Ebert

I'm a fan of the western genre. When I see a character actor, I see a whole movie behind a scene before and after. There's a whole other movie behind it. — Gore Verbinski

For me it's about the character, not as much about the genre of it [movie]. I'm excited that I get to work and play interesting characters and I'm not just the girl who gets to play the girlfriend or the wife. I get to play real women who have struggles and troubles and passions and that's always what I hope to do no matter what format that lies in. — Ali Larter

World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and 'Fury' occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film. — Richard Corliss

I'm open to doing any kind of role and any kind of genre as long as it's interesting and as long as I feel it could be a great character to play. I never take into my own personal opinions or my own public image into account when I chose movie roles. — Leonardo DiCaprio

Die Hard represents the class of modern action pictures and the standard by which they must be judged. Few films falling into the "mindless entertainment" genre have as much going for them as this movie. Not only is it a thrill-a-minute ride, but it has one of the best film villains in recent memory, a hero everyone can relate to, dialogue that crackles with wit, and a lot of very impressive pyrotechnics. — James Berardinelli

Christopher Nolan's astounding third Batman feature, 'The Dark Knight Rises,' represents the true maturation of the superhero movie - and provides the key to understanding the bottomless craving moviegoers have for these films, 34 years after the Christopher Reeve Superman gave birth to the genre. — John Podhoretz

When you're doing a comedy and you want to somehow satirise people who are taking themselves seriously, I think the most serious genre is the thing you're going to get the most out of. If you're trying to satirise a comedy, it's hard to do that - it doesn't really work as well. But I love the war movie genre and I'm a fan of all those movies that are part of what this movie is. — Ben Stiller

When I tried to get 'Stargate' made, I took it to every studio in Hollywood and every studio said, 'Sci-fi is dead. It's a dead genre. No one wants to see science fiction anymore.' And I had to go and raise the money independently to make that movie. — Dean Devlin

I love the gangster genre, but how many gangster movies are there? If I get a good gangster movie script, I'll do it. — Graham King

The business didn't trust it, audiences didn't want it, but marriage could never be ignored. It was everywhere and nowhere, the genre that dared not speak its name, the ghost that hung over the happy ending of every romantic comedy. As a subject, it existed to be achieved (jolly comedy, great love story), destroyed (death, murder, tragedy), or denied (divorce). If it was achieved, the movie was over. If it was destroyed, it was no longer there, gotten rid of and abandoned once and for all. If it was denied, it was only temporarily shelved (for some fun) and could be reassuringly restored. — Jeanine Basinger

The Holocaust movie is almost a genre in itself these days. — Viggo Mortensen

I believe [ ... ] that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. [ ... ] I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills on the businessman's special to Tokyo. — Stephen Jay Gould

The only genre of movie that I could see making that doesn't have anything magical or otherworldly about it would be a war film. I'm very interested in history, and a war film could be something that would lure me in. — Neill Blomkamp

When a horror movie is well done, I love it and I put it up in esteem with any other genre. — David Hayter

Every now and then we find ourselves living through moments that make no sense at all. It's almost as if some omnipotent film editor has snipped us out of our familiar everyday movie and spliced us into something completely random, from a different time and genre and even from a foreign country and partially animated, because suddenly you look around you and the language is unknown and nothing that happens has any relationship to what you think of as reality. This — Jeff Lindsay

I came from advertising. For me it's about protecting the director's vision. That's always the goal. There's keeping things on budget and on time and dealing with selling the movie so that to me is a focus. But also it's about serving the script. We are genre filmmakers, those are the films we love to make, so my perspective is a little different. — Charles Roven

'Dark Circles' is a great relationship/character piece and also a horror film. It tinkered with the genre, which I loved. I was sick of seeing the same thing, sick of people just trying to get a movie made. — Johnathon Schaech

What bother me, not "bother me," exactly; that's not the right way to put it. But especially in the horror genre, once a movie like Paranormal Activity comes out and becomes popular - and that's a totally fine and valid movie - everyone starts copying it. Everything becomes a found-footage movie that looks like somebody shot it with their phone. — Rob Zombie

'New' movies are almost always hipper, faster, they mix genres aggressively, they smother their genre origins in new form, there are fewer of them, and they tend to cost a lot more money because you usually make more money on the megahit than you do on the steady progression of break-eveners. Except for the horror movie. — Stephen Hunter

I always wanted to get into the horror genre. I like scary movies. I want to go to the fan shows and sign posters with my head hanging by a thread like a B-movie actress. — Illeana Douglas