Blockbuster Potential Quotes

The stakes are high on every film now because there's the opening weekend. The first week is extremely crucial; increasingly, films are being judged in terms of opening day, opening weekend, then first week. People are going berserk promoting their films.

Of course there are a lot of books that are interesting to make movies out of, but on the other hand, I think video games are also kind of like bestselling books for the younger generation, and the younger generation is the one going to the theaters.

I think taking the biggest star in India and the biggest star in America, and putting them together in a movie that starts in America and ends up in India, or starts in India and goes to America. I think it would be a buddy cop formula.

I have aspirations of making a big, historical epic. I don't know if I'll ever get the money to do it.

Certainly, no studio is going to put its money and its muscle behind something that they don't think they can spin five or six movies out of and build a whole kind of imaginary universe from anymore, I think.

That for me is what intrigues me the most about feature films. It's not like the little kind of esoteric projects that you and your friends get but how do you make something that has a universal appeal. Those are the movies that intrigue me the most.

They literally have what they would call "a four-quadrant" movie that they could just release at any moment. Parents want to go there, kids want to go there, hipsters want to go there. It's like everyone will want to see it.

And how deeply do I let business considerations affect [screenwriting] choices that might otherwise be more or less esthetic? . . . Do I choose the upbeat rather than the downer ending because I know it will score better at the preview? Can the idea be sold in a single sentence? Can it compete with space aliens and tornadoes and missions impossible?

You can't say, "I'm gonna make a hit movie." You're as dead as you could be.