Joe Dante Quotes

#1. A lot of filmmakers from my generation were lucky enough to have their work more or less perpetuated by people who saw them originally on TV and on HBO and certainly on home video.

Joe Dante

#2. Daffy, of course, wants to go on the journey with him but the studio decides they want Daffy back, so Bugs and a young studio executive heroine have to go out and try to bring him back.

Joe Dante

#3. I don't believe that you can judge the worth of a movie in the atmosphere in which it comes out the first time. There's just so many reasons why some pictures don't catch on.

Joe Dante

#4. Movies get found in the editing room. The movie that you make is not always necessarily the movie that comes out of the editing room. The trick is to perfect the movie that you have and make it the best version of what you've shot, regardless of what the intent may have been.

Joe Dante

#5. You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

Joe Dante

#6. I don't think you can ever be ahead of your time with cynicism about that subject. No, I don't think it was ahead of its time. I think it was very much a product of its time.

Joe Dante

#7. I'm always looking for films, but the horror scripts that I get tend to be very repetitive and often not that interesting.

Joe Dante

#8. Editing is kind of a solitary job.

Joe Dante

#9. I've always felt that I shouldn't make a movie if someone else could do it better.

Joe Dante

#10. There go the goddamn brownies!

Joe Dante

#11. I like working with kid actors because they surprise you constantly. I mean, all actors do - but kids particularly.

Joe Dante

#12. My generation remembered going to the movies as an event. We would see these things, we would bring them home, and we would think about them for years because it would take a long time before they would go on television where you could re-experience the fun that you had when you watched them.

Joe Dante

#13. If you're doing a family movie, you don't want it to be stupid. Farting chihuahuas is not my idea of entertainment for kids or adults. So you try to make a movie that adults can see on one level, and kids can see on another.

Joe Dante

#14. Editing is where movies are made or broken. Many a film has been saved and many a film has been ruined in the editing room.

Joe Dante

#15. I love 'Evil Dead 2!' Who doesn't love 'Evil Dead 2?'

Joe Dante

#16. I think 'Pan's Labyrinth' is genius.

Joe Dante

#17. It's very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.

Joe Dante

#18. I mean, movies are all geared to be basically under 25, and they're all tentpoles, explosions, excitement and all that - they take advantage of the big screen, which is great.

Joe Dante

#19. When the first movie to show the anger people have about the war is a grade Z zombie movie, that tells you all you need to know about how afraid of ruffling anyone's feathers people in the movie business are today.

Joe Dante

#20. The dynamic is extremely similar to Gremlins and the hero is very similar, plus the small town atmosphere. It really is in a way the third Gremlins movie.

Joe Dante

#21. When I was growing up in the '60s I would have thought that westerns would last forever.

Joe Dante

#22. What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I don't know how long that's going to last.

Joe Dante

#23. There's so little difference between television and features as far as you make the film. I mean, you have less money and it's a little quicker, but the concept is all on television.

Joe Dante

#24. I think that anybody that wants to direct, particularly writers, should spend some time in an editing room, whether it's a film of theirs or someone else's, or shoot their own picture on video and cut it.

Joe Dante

#25. I really have to feel that I could make a difference in the movie, or I shouldn't be doing it.

Joe Dante

#26. I've made a lot of movies with kids in them. I don't know why that is, but it's something I've noticed.

Joe Dante

#27. I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

Joe Dante

#28. You do form a cadre of people that you trust and who are good at their jobs and who know you and what your quirks and foibles are. It makes making movies very collegial and a lot more fun.

Joe Dante

#29. When you make a 3-D movie you actually have to plan the way the visuals look because there's a parallax issue, and there's an issue of editing; you can't edit very quickly in 3-D because the eye won't adjust fast enough for it.

Joe Dante

#30. I grew up in New Jersey and my father was a golf pro, so I was groomed for sports, but I wasn't very good, so my interests lay elsewhere.

Joe Dante

#31. It's a lot of power to give the director to edit his own stuff. It's also a time thing: you don't want to have to wait for the guy to finish shooting before he starts editing.

Joe Dante

#32. 'Avatar' is the greatest, most comprehensive collection of movie cliches ever assembled, but it's put together in a brand new way with a new technology, and tremendous imagination, making it a true epic and a kind of a milestone.

Joe Dante

#33. Repetitiveness is one of the things that's most difficult to get away from in genre pictures, because people come specifically to see certain kinds of things but get disappointed if they're presented in the same way. So to try to find a new way to show old stuff is always the challenge.

Joe Dante

#34. Finding a writer who can write decent kids' dialog and finding kids that can act realistically and not 'cute' is an effort.

Joe Dante

#35. So I've always been kind of an apocalyptic kind of kid, and looking back at the movies I've done, there's some kind of apocalypse in them. So that must be what scares me ... besides Republicans.

Joe Dante