The movie has to be going somewhere. Other than that, you want it to be entertaining, but people usually disagree on what entertaining is and everybody has different tastes.
What are movies for if not to have the good guys triumph over the bad ones?
I'm not going to make movies that tell children, "You should despair and run away".
Not every movie has to serve as every audience member's need for completion.
Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.
It's always great to do a movie that you find is entertaining, but also can give some sort of political or social message.
People don't go to the movies to get the news, people don't go to the movies to learn a lesson. People go to the movie to get an emotional experience.
People don't go to see things in the theater for the same reasons that I do. And movies are about mass audiences. And so moviegoers are going for a different kind of drug than for a certain kind of literary quality.
A movie that is unable to elicit emotion isn't a movie.
I don't really want to do the Hollywood thing. I think you ought to try to say something with your movies.
The Shawshank Redemption' isn't a movie about a black guy and a white guy who become friends - it's a movie about freedom. At the end, the cathartic experience of seeing our own emotions reflected back to us, that's the purpose of storytelling.
Not everybody goes to movies to get their life changed.
Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies.
It drives me crazy when people say, "All we're trying to do is create entertainment." I feel like people go to movies for more than that.
I think every film has a destiny.
It's more important you learn what to make movies about than how to make movies
You never know what you have until you put it in front of an audience. That's the truth. That's the truth of filmmaking and that's why you make movies, for an audience to, hopefully, enjoy it.
We make movies to endorse our own personal feelings. I am not, in fact, a documentary filmmaker. I've got my personal beliefs, and I'm ready to put them out on the table.
I want to make a movie that has enough impact that it's going to do what it needs to do. But I don't want to make a film that serial killers masturbate to.
I have no interest in movies that take you somewhere dark and leave you there, for no reason.
