Akiva Schaffer Quotes

I don't get it when you get so much openness about the way movies are made, and the special effects and the behind-the-scenes stuff and all of that. I can't help but feel like this reduces it a little bit.

That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.

Something like 'Alien,' that was not so easy. If there's any genre I wouldn't mind not having to do anymore, it would be science fiction. It's just all to do with the toys, and there's so much hanging around.

I like to give dimension to shots inside action scenes. It's demanding because you have to rehearse a lot of things happening at the same time and frame all those things in a shot. But I feel like when you accomplish that then you've got a cool action scene.

Every other movie is one of those action things. I mean, 'Lost in Space'? A bunch of good actors running around shooting at special effects on a soundstage? I took my kids to see that and felt like I was on an acid trip.

I think the Matrix effect is over-used and I don't do it anymore.

Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.

Whether it's on top of a phone booth or a $200 million soundstage, it's about stories.

At least I want to be making films that are somehow born out of me that are stories I want to tell. The challenge is figuring out how to do it where you can make them personal, yet still deliver to an audience a film experience that is satisfying and emotional, and that's what I'm trying to do.

You are always hoping that movie audiences are interested in characters and interested in story values rather than just mindless special effects. But you never know.

What's so cool about movies is once you're done with the movie, you put it away and come up with a whole new different idea with different characters and a different world. But in TV, you build these characters, and you build this world, and then you're there for however long you do the show.

I find myself really privileged to be able to go in and look at a set that the likes of Hollywood can provide, and say, 'My God, look at the craftsmanship in this; look at the ambition in it, the scale of it.'

When I was a child, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist because I loved dinosaurs. I loved monster movies and sci-fi, and then 'Star Wars' came out, and I was completely out of my mind with that, with 'Close Encounters,' and then I thought maybe I was going to go into special effects makeup, which I thought was awesome.

I wouldn't mind doing my own film on the big screen. That'd be cool.

I saw 'Avatar' and liked it very much. It was a great achievement.

How stupid do you have to be to imagine that you can turn 'The Lord Of The Rings' into a film script?

I don't want to make movies for kids, and I don't want to make movies for adults either.

The most important thing when you do a movie is that you find an audience that really understands what you want to do and is really supportive of it.

I spent four months in Prague in these blue rooms reacting to nothing and you basically place your faith in the hands of the director and the special effects co-coordinator and you keep your fingers crossed and hope that the creatures look really scary.

The irony is that you can't use real rain to make movies.

I don't want to just make horror movies; I don't want to just make any type of movie - I don't just like horror movies, I love movies.

I can't wait for them to convert old movies to 3D. I am 100% confident I want them to convert 'Terminator 2' to 3D more than I want anything in the world.

The budgets are much higher now, it costs more to make a movie and the kids that go to see them are into instant gratification. They want things bigger and bigger. I don't make those kind of movies. I make movies about relationships.

We ended up realizing that's not an economical way to create creatures, putting people in green leotards and figuring it out later. You can maybe do that if you're making 'Avatar,' but we need to know what the creatures look like before we turn on the camera.

It's not about choosing a specific genre; that's not how I go about deciding what movies to make.