Recent quotes:

‘Barry’: Bill Hader on “Disturbing” Season 3 Finale, What’s Next – The Hollywood Reporter

It’s interesting, comedy in general. I showed my kids Naked Gun, and we were dying laughing. I haven’t seen a movie like that for a long time. Actually, I take that back: Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar was really funny, hysterical. But so much of what’s funny, and where people are getting their comedy buzzes from: YouTube, in reality, in life. What used to be, “Oh, my God, you gotta go see this new Naked Gun movie,” is now, “Watch this five-second clip of a guy falling off a Segway.” (Laughs.) I remember being at SNL, and we would watch news bloopers, or whatever thing someone would send you, and you would go, “We can never be this funny.” When I was a kid, you would take your video camera around, and you would do things you saw in movies. Now it’s, “Here’s my YouTube channel.” It’s just different, but I don’t bemoan it. I just think things evolve. I love reading about Old Hollywood and the advent of television and how that flipped everybody out. The conversation of “Movies are dead, and comedy is fucked” has been going on forever.

Light as a fairy tale: What makes a feel-good film feel good? First large-scale study of feel-good films and their audiences -- ScienceDaily

"In addition to an element of humor and the classic happy ending, feel-good films can be identified by certain recurring plot patterns and characters," explains study leader and first author Keyvan Sarkhosh. "Often these involve outsiders in search of true love, who have to prove themselves and fight against adverse circumstances, and who eventually find their role in the community." But feel-good films are characterized not just by romance and humor, but also by moments of drama, which usually have a strong emotional effect on viewers. At the same time, these features are often embedded in a fairy-tale setting, which is another typical aspect of the genre and contributes considerably to its perceived lightness. Not least, the mixture of all these elements can be considered constitutive of the feel-good film.

Alexander Korda: Churchill’s Man in Hollywood | Finest Hour 179

In Churchill’s George V screenplay, the following line appears: “In all her wars, England always wins one battle—the last.” In 1942, he delivered the same line to tremendous applause, in what he termed “The Bright Gleam of Victory” speech.

Honnold climbs to avoid the dips and flatlands

“Yes. I think I gravitate towards being a somewhat depressed person. Or—I don’t know actually. I’m sort of just flat…I feel like I don’t have any of the highs. I kind of go from level, to slightly below level, to back. It’s all pretty flat…Sometimes you just feel useless, you know? But in some ways I embrace that as part of the process because you kind of have to feel like a worthless piece of poop in order to get motivated enough to go do something that makes you feel less useless. But then ultimately that still doesn’t make you feel any less useless, so you just have to keep doing more.”

Hippocampus maps relationship of scenes?

Aya Ben-Yakov and Richard Henson found that the hippocampus responded most strongly to the films at the points that independent observers identified as the end of one event and the beginning of a new one. The researchers found a strong match between these event boundaries and participants’ hippocampal activity, varying according to the degree to which the independent observers agreed on the transition points between events. While watching the two-hour long Forrest Gump, hippocampal response was more strongly influenced by the subjective event boundaries than by what the filmmaker may consider a transition between scenes, such as a change in location.

Victoria Is an Insane 138-Minute Movie Filmed in One Continuous Take

I think one of the least important things you need for making a film whether you’re an an actor or director is your brain. One of the most important things is your intuition and to get into the flow and really understand. That’s what makes a film radiate. Your brain get come in the way so that you’re controlling everything and eliminate mistakes, so that all of a sudden your job as a director is to always make everything clean. At the same time, [shooting in a one-take format] was a great, amazing gift: losing a lot and winning way more. It was still a very close call. I know the actors loved all three takes we did, but in my world only the last one is a film.

Sometimes things are simpler than they look

The underwhelming results for “Vacation,” written and directed by Jonathan M. Goldstein and John Francis Daley, follow poor turnout for R-rated summer comedies like “Entourage,” “Magic Mike XXL” and “Ted 2.” Released in March, the R-rated “Get Hard” did only modest business, especially for a Will Ferrell vehicle. “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” which also carried an R rating, bombed in February. That run has left Hollywood scratching its head. What’s happening? And what does it mean for R-rated comedies in the pipeline? Start with quality. Most of the comedies that have missed the box-office mark also received largely negative reviews from critics. (“Vacation” generated reviews that were 76 percent negative, according to the website Rotten Tomatoes.) Notably, the two recent R-rated comedies that have succeeded — “Trainwreck,” starring Amy Schumer, and “Spy,” with Melissa McCarthy — both received excellent reviews.

The future of film is...

The more you dig into the technology and the more you learn it, you are going to get ideas you would never have thought of without knowing your technology. The kind of shots you can get from an iPhone that you cannot get with any other camera. Use it. GoPros: use it. Be inspired by it. Try things. It’s digital. Get another memory card, for God’s sake.

Invoking Star Wars to justify your movie is a bad sign

But when people say "this is my Star Wars," they usually aren't comparing any of the actual elements of Star Wars to anything in their movie. They're meaning "this will be a huge expansive saga with cuteness and danger," or else, "This was something where I obsessed about the crunchy edges of the mythos for way too long." For example, Last Airbender writer/director M. Night Shyamalan made a big point of comparing his movie to Star Wars in every interview, but the resulting film did a disservice to both the original cartoon and Star Wars. Also, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem writer/directors the Strause Brothers invoked the Star Wars comparison a lot. The point is not that people shouldn't invoke Star Wars — it's just a bad sign when you invoke it for stuff that's really nothing like Star Wars.

A Hollywood marketing hack gushes about the Jobs script

It's brilliant. It's perfect. […]Let's take the obvious off the table here - there are marketing liabilities to this script. It's long, it's claustrophobic, it's talky[…]Doesn't matter. We release this over Christmas, let the award buzz and word of mouth buoy it to where it needs to go. While there are a bunch of reasons to try to revise it […]it would topple the elegant house-of-cards-ness of it […]t's a mediation on Jobs himself. It's one of his early computers - closed end to end. […]I kept begging for someone to walk outside, for some daylight[…]But Sorkin is so brilliant with the structure. […]Just when Jobs lets up, the script finally breathes for the first time. It's really spectacular. […]but I'm a sucker for layered, thoughtful filmmaking. Sure it's got a marketing issues but I think it also has the panacea for those - I believe it will be brilliant. I do think the one thing that can hinder that is if it's too long. […] That's the other thing - this can't be without a star playing Jobs and can't be done by just anyone. Obviously. The script is a prefect 10 but in the wrong hands it grosses mid 30's.[…]while tricky - people deserve this kind of movie and in some weird way we have a responsibility to take these kinds of risks. Not to make it seem like we're saving lives - but I actually think that. This is the kind of film that makes me thankful for movies and they're few and far between these days.[…]It's exciting.

Why not work with Angie Jolie?

I'm not destroying my career over a minimally talented spoiled brat who thought nothing of shoving this off her plate for eighteen months so she could go direct a movie. I have no desire to be making a movie with her, or anybody, that she runs and that we don't. She's a camp event and a celebrity and that's all and the last thing anybody needs is to make a giant bomb with her that any fool could see coming.
Emily: I really thought my dad was the hero. Not that he wasn't heroic, but I thought he killed the shark basically single-handedly and then swam home. Ben: I had just seen Jaws last year when my mother had said, "Oh, look, Jaws is on. My favorite part is when dad kills the shark." And I was like, "Dad didn't kill the shark." And, she was like, "Shut up, Ben. I was married to him. He killed Jaws." And so we watched it and, of course, he doesn't kill Jaws. And she was like, "Oh, wow, I guess he doesn't kill Jaws. I've been telling people I've been married to Roy Scheider, I guess."
I was making a documentary about the filming of the movie and its effect on the city, how it, for example, locked off entire blocks of downtown Chicago from public access. […] There were three types of filmmaking happening all at once, I then realized: a multimillion-dollar global Hollywood blockbuster, my modest independent documentary, and the dozens of amateur videos all being created in an instant. […] I also realized that everyone in their own way was making their own version of Transformers, based on the small privileged glimpses they had of this massive production. I started to notice these videos popping up on YouTube, and not just from Chicago, but from Utah, Texas, Detroit, Hong Kong. After a weekend of keyword-spelunking through the caves of YouTube, I emerged with 355 videos that documented the production. In a sense, the documentary of the making of Transformers had already been made, in 355 pieces. Now it was a matter of figuring out how the pieces fit together.
Shortly after we relocated from Dallas to Manhattan in 1995 and moved into a 250-square-foot apartment in the West Village, we saw Michael Mann’s “Heat” on opening night. It knocked us out. Jen said she found that closing shot in the weeds at the airport — Pacino holding the dying De Niro’s hand while Moby’s “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” droned and the runway lights flashed — to be as beautiful and mysterious as the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”