Hollywood Movie Sayings

#1. I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#2. Musical chairs or Russian roulette? Sometimes there's as much tense drama in the casting of a Hollywood movie as there is in the finished product.

Richard Corliss

#3. Filmmakers, they tell me they want to make movies. I say, 'Good, go out, buy a $500 camera, get some friends and make a movie. Don't go to Hollywood. Stay wherever you are.'

Alan Arkin

#4. When the script for 'The Wrestler' kept coming to me I said, This movie is so good if you put me in the film as a wrestler people are going to say, 'No credibility, Hulk Hogan isn't a good actor,' whatever Hollywood thinks of me.

Hulk Hogan

#5. I don't know the figures, but Hollywood must buy 100 rights for every movie that actually gets made.

Bryan Burrough

#6. If you're a big Hollywood star, you make one movie a year at the most. I can make five in Europe.

Franco Nero

#7. No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.

Anthony Minghella

#8. I just think the David O. Selznick story is one of the great, epic stories of Hollywood history that nobody knows. Maybe one of the reasons why nobody knows it is because he wasn't a movie star.

Karina Longworth

#9. For John Woo, it is quite difficult to make a movie in Hollywood in his own style. Because Hollywood is based on a producer system, it is difficult for a director to express himself using his own style of filmmaking.

Alan Mak

#10. I hadn't made a big-budget film, and in Hollywood there's a sort of man and boys situation. You're a man, you make $80 million movies! As if it's harder to make an $80 million movie. Well, I guess businesswise it is because you have more executives to argue with.

Gus Van Sant

#11. It has never ever been a bad thing in Hollywood to be sleeping with a director who's just won an Oscar or the hot new movie star whose face is on the cover of 'Time' magazine.

Kelly Rutherford

#12. I've spent several years in Hollywood, and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.

Wilson Mizner

#13. The thing that really makes me happy is the real work and rehearsing and creating the character and the process of making the movie. Hollywood's not real.

Penelope Cruz

#14. Look at every action movie in Hollywood. Every leading man from Spider-Man to Batman to James Bond, 'Bourne Identity', every one of them possesses martial arts skills.

Donnie Yen

#15. The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.

Peter Thiel

#16. I'm in Hollywood - I have no business not being in the movie industry.

Ariel Pink

#17. Making a movie is still very difficult in Hollywood, regardless of what you have and what level you're at. It is a house of cards, and things have to perfectly align.

Nat Faxon

#18. Hollywood is a roulette wheel. Each project dictates what's going to happen for you next, and it doesn't really matter that your project is critically acclaimed or won awards or has fans worldwide. It's a matter of how many movie tickets and DVDs and on-demand movies that you sell.

Adam Green

#19. It was the only ambition I ever had - not to be a dancer or Hollywood movie star, but to be a housewife in a good marriage.

Doris Day

#20. Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime - the aforementioned "unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity." Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distasteful that their introduction has been delayed as long as possible.

John Irving

#21. I have not walked away from Hollywood. I'm walking away from the way I personally did business in Hollywood. The budget of whatever movie I do needs to be efficient; it needs to consider what kind of resources we're using and how to be as responsible as possible.

Tom Shadyac

#22. U.S. foreign policy is Manichaean. It's like a Hollywood movie. You have to know who has the white hat and who has the black hat and then go against the black hat.

Carlos Fuentes

#23. Hollywood have been in touch; they want to make a movie of my life.

Mark Roberts

#24. The Hollywood image of the movie business is all about ambition and high achievers like James Cameron. But the British film industry is much more about men who wear cravats and work with model trains and hope another series of 'Thomas the Tank Engine' will be commissioned.

Peter Capaldi

#25. For me, trying to expand the energy to make one movie in Hollywood would be the equivalent in terms of energy to making 10 movies in Japan.

Takashi Miike

#26. I figured that, if you do a vampire movie in Hollywood, you've made it.

Christopher Atkins

#27. Providing 'freemium' cloud storage to society is not a crime. What will Hollywood do when smartphones and tablets can wirelessly transfer a movie file within milliseconds?

Kim Dotcom

#28. If someone was making a movie about F1 in the last six months, they wouldn't need to add a Hollywood ending. If they do make that movie, it's got to be 'The Curious Case Of Jenson Button,' where I've lived my life backwards. I'd like Johnny Depp to play me but he wouldn't be quite right.

Jenson Button

#29. Nobody in Hollywood ever sets out to make a bad movie ever but about 99% of the time, that's what happens.

Thomas Lennon

#30. After Hollywood, you know if people are interested in you or in the fact that you've been in a movie. You know who your real friends are.

Emily Browning

#31. Who is writing these screenwriting books? Not actually writing for the studios in Hollywood. These are people that have one or a half of a credit on maybe one movie, or none. So they're all theoretical.

Thomas Lennon

#32. The average development time for a Hollywood movie is nine years. Nine years for a studio film. And a lot of what you do is abstract.

Stephen Gaghan

#33. I went to Hollywood to test for Martha Ivers and I thought I was going to play the part that Van Heflin played.But they wanted me to play the part of Barbara Stanwyck's husband, so I played that. Then when I finished the movie, I went back to Broadway and did another flop.

Kirk Douglas

#34. No matter how successful you get in Hollywood, you cannot rest. Your new movie doesn't open well; they're looking for the next person to replace you; it's always something. You never have true peace.

Emma Caulfield

#35. Capra is an old-time movie craftsman, the master of every trick in the bag, and in many ways he is more at home with the medium than any other Hollywood director. But all of his details give the impression of contrived effect.

Manny Farber

#36. Ego problems are endemic in every walk of life, but in the movie business egomaniacs are megalomaniacs.

Lynda Obst

#37. JK Rowling combines the ideas and imagination of an entire Hollywood movie studio with the precise execution of an extremely efficient dictator.

Stephen Prosapio

#38. The black community in Hollywood is very small and close-knit. Everyone has a common goal: to make a two-hour movie in 30 days.

Gabrielle Union

#39. My first in, my first break, was I met a director and got to talking with her, and she happened to be casting this movie that she had written. That was ten years ago. That got me to Hollywood. I got paid $700 bucks.

Chris Pratt

#40. People are always telling women to lose weight, and then when they do, other women attack them for it.

Candace Bushnell

#41. If a movie isn't a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.

Roger Ebert

#42. Working with David Cronenberg or Darren Aronofsky or even Steven Soderbergh isn't really like a typical Hollywood movie. These are true artists, and have a certain amount of freedom when they work, and they're more like independent filmmakers making their way through big studios.

Vincent Cassel

#43. There are very few distributors left to do off-Hollywood movies, and those distributors generally have got thousands of movies to choose from. So you're pretty lucky if you get one to even take your movie and it's pretty rare that they pay anything upfront.

John Sayles

#44. A generation before, it had been sagebrush and coyotes; a generation later, it was a burgeoning movie town. But for that brief idyllic time in 1910, Hollywood looked like the perfect place for a successful writer to settle down, build his dream house, and maybe do some gardening.

Kage Baker

#45. Bette Davis taught Hollywood to follow an actress instead of the actress following the camera, and she's probably the best movie actress there's ever been.

Elaine Stritch

#46. I would like to have a movie under my own control sometime, and see what could be done with it. Who knows? Maybe Hollywood will make an improvisational movie someday.

Alan Arkin

#47. Training Day was such a Hollywood movie; I didn't like it.

Jason Patric

#48. I spent my childhood watching every scary movie that Hollywood ever made. And I think that gave me the best education for storytelling. It also made me want to reproduce the scary moments that I felt, sitting in a theater at the age of 5.

Tess Gerritsen

#49. You have to throw yourself into a situation of trust with these things, especially that first day when you don't know someone and you're on a massive Disney Hollywood movie set.

Richard Madden

#50. we didn't know what was impossible. Neither, apparently, did he: He was among the first to believe that Hollywood movie execs would care a fig about what was happening in academia.

Ed Catmull

#51. I'd done a ton of movies here in Hollywood, and I realized that every movie I'd done was somebody's else's work and someone else's vision.

Harland Williams

#52. 47 Ronin is a very special movie for me. Not only a Samurai thing. Not only a Hollywood fantasy. It has a very special mixture between Japanese traditional culture and Western culture for the costume, set, story. Everything. I believe it will be a very special film that no one has ever seen.

Hiroyuki Sanada

#53. I like travelling and if I have to come to Hollywood to make a movie I will, but otherwise I'd never move there. It's very much an industry town and that doesn't really interest me.

Juliette Binoche

#54. Hollywood's a business, and until someone puts their finger on you and decides you're the guy who's going to carry that movie, it's not going to happen.

Anthony Mackie

#55. Unfortunately, many talented people in Hollywood find their values and politics do not reflect the content they create, and many movie themes are in direct contrast with over half of today's American families.

Allen Covert

#56. What I learned from my go-round with 'In the Heights' is that it's tough to make a movie. In Hollywood, even the people in charge have people in charge.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

#57. The criteria, for me, is movie star. It's Hollywood. Not Somalia.

Steven Cojocaru

#58. I don't think the film is going to work for everybody, period. It wasn't meant to be done for everybody. I didn't four quadrant this movie, like Hollywood did. I knew it was a very specific audience that was there. We're also taking a shot in the dark.

Joseph M. Kahn

#59. Hollywood is the backdrop of my family, and I know that the movie business is incredibly cruel as you get older.

Jamie Lee Curtis

#60. Rome is magic, it's like being in Hollywood. But the difference between Hollywood and Rome is that here you don't have just the movie business. The movie business is so little, so you also have the choice to hang out with people who do different kinds of business.

Maria Grazia Cucinotta

#61. I've always thought John Travolta is one of the greatest movie stars Hollywood has ever produced.

Quentin Tarantino

#62. When I tried to get 'Stargate' made, I took it to every studio in Hollywood and every studio said, 'Sci-fi is dead. It's a dead genre. No one wants to see science fiction anymore.' And I had to go and raise the money independently to make that movie.

Dean Devlin

#63. This is true Hollywood glamour! I am taking personal jewels from a screen legend and creating a one-of-a-kind pair of shoes,which will be worn by a movie star of today.

Stuart Weitzman

#64. I suppose movie theaters are the churches of the modern age, where we gather reverently to worship the tinsel gods of Hollywood.

Michael Dirda

#65. The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.

Mylo Carbia

#66. At the time I came along, Hollywood's idea of teen movies meant there had to be a lot of nudity, usually involving boys in pursuit of sex, and pretty gross overall. Either that or a horror movie. And the last thing Hollywood wanted in their teen movies was teenagers!

John Hughes

#67. I wanted to do another movie that could make us laugh and cry and feel good about the world. I wanted to do something else that could make us smile. This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.

Steven Spielberg

#68. The stultifying effect of the movies is not that the children see them but that their parents do, as if Hollywood provided a plausible adult recreation to grow up into.

Paul Goodman

#69. Denzel Washington is a big Hollywood movie star now. But he started out as an actor in the Negro Ensemble company.

Pearl Cleage

#70. My grandmother and I followed my mother here, to a house a block north of Hollywood Boulevard but a million miles away from Hollywood, if you know what I mean. We would hang out behind the ropes and look at the movie stars arriving at the premieres.

Carol Burnett

#71. My real difficulty was to become a normal person again, after having been a movie actress for so long. For me, at the time I was living in New York and Hollywood, a normal person was someone who made movies.

Grace Kelly

#72. I like movies that are scary, but I don't want them to be dirt dumb. I want a movie that gets my blood racing, makes me laugh, but also gives me something to think about, with maybe a little sexy thrown in. Hollywood doesn't make movies like that.

Penn Jillette

#73. New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.

John Cusack

#74. Sure it could get rough sometimes, but life wasn't a Hollywood movie. Shit happened. You fought, you screamed, and somehow you worked like hell to get out the other side still intact.

Samantha Young

#75. I didn't want to be a Hollywood actress who every so often does a Broadway play. I wanted to be a Broadway actress who every so often does a movie.

Geraldine Page

#76. Hollywood is the sort of town where you wake up in the morning and look out to see if it's still there. I expect the whole movie colony to pick up its tents one night and go back to whatever fairyland they came from.

Pamela Moore

#77. It's the same the world over. A Hollywood production comes to town, and the locals all turn movie crazy.

Roger Ebert

#78. Used to Sears, JC Penney, and Woolworth's, Birmingham's stores sounded foreign: Gucci, Jacobson's, and Dittrich Furs. Underground parking kept the shoppers flawlessly coifed and dry - a scene from a Hollywood movie.

Claudia Whitsitt

#79. A big, sweeping, and rapturous Hollywood love story that could turn out to be the most revolutionary movie of the year! A film in which love feels almost as if it were being invented. It is also a rare crowd-pleaser with the potential to change hearts and minds.

Owen Gleiberman

#80. You can be good in a good movie, you can be good in a bad movie, you can be bad in a bad movie, but never, ever, be bad in a good movie.

John Gielgud

#81. I began to think, now is the time. I found quite a lot of opposition in Hollywood about the idea of doing a film musical and we ended up having to buy the rights back. I'm glad we did because it meant John and I were able to make exactly the movie we wanted.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

#82. In England when you make a movie even the weather is against you. In Hollywood the weatherman gets a shooting schedule from all the major studios and then figures out where he can fit in a little rain without upsetting Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer too much.

Bob Hope

#83. What does she do?"
"She's a producer." Of course, in Los Angeles this doesn't mean much more than "she's a member of the human race.

Julian Fellowes

#84. Every sacred cow in the business has to do with economics.

Gena Rowlands

#85. The Hollywood system has its own problems. Movie making is never an easy job.

Ryuhei Kitamura

#86. One of the things you have to understand with The Room, I never approached a studio to produce, because I know no one in Hollywood will produce this. I came to Hollywood and I said "I will produce this movie the way I want it."

Tommy Wiseau

#87. I love watching old movies anyway - I grew up with my mom watching old movies and being immersed in the history of old Hollywood.

Lily Collins

#88. Isn't Hollywood - and I love movies - a lot of it about a big lie?

Chris Matthews

#89. I figured, when I make a movie, especially earlier in my career, one thing I was going to make sure was that the movie doesn't cost a lot and that it has potential to make a lot of money. That's how you get respect in Hollywood.

Ice Cube

#90. I haven't been to a movie for three months of Sundays. I gather from what Carolyn reports that Hollywood now produces false entertainment: unmitigated violence on the screen; snickering, laughter in the audience.

John Cage

#91. What will you do?"
"Oh, hell, I'll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie."
"What are you going to call it?"
"Hollywood."
"Hollywood?"
"Yes ...

Charles Bukowski

#92. I thought that Hollywood was just for geniuses and that directors come from three generations of directors. I was worried that I was not up to the challenge of making a movie. Then realized that all a director has to do is know what he wants to do.

Fede Alvarez

#93. To me, I approach a small-budget, artsy, European movie the same way as a big commercial Hollywood movie. That's the most important thing. Hollywood usually represents this big dream in people's minds, but to me, it's just hard work.

Olga Kurylenko

#94. What's really exciting for me is communicating to other people and not just going somewhere to make a movie. That's Hollywood to me and it would mean nothing.

Alejandro Amenabar

#95. Hollywood is right. A good and strong movie can have a more powerful social impact than any and all political speeches or newspaper editorials and columns.

Mike Royko

#96. In Hollywood, for me, it's all about the movie stars and the singers. Baseball players don't draw too much attention; we're low key. I'm good with faces and sometimes bad with names, but I'll walk up to somebody if I know who they are ... show them some love.

Matt Kemp

#97. Dune was really my first Hollywood job. It was such a small part, but I opened the movie. I was about 19 years old and I had to make this speech, and I didn't understand most of the words because they were, you know, words from Dune.

Virginia Madsen

#98. I'm kind of shocked that it's taken Hollywood so long to realize that so many great movie talents can come out of television. One of the reasons they do is that on TV you don't have the luxury of a film's big budget, and people have to compensate with creativity.

James Van Der Beek

#99. The turning point in my career was Jaws. It was a turning point because I was a director-for-hire before Jaws and because it was such a big hit I could do any movie I wanted and Hollywood just wrote me a cheque.

Steven Spielberg

#100. For Hollywood to make 'Spider-Man,' only to redo the movie a couple years later, just boggles the mind. To recast 'The Incredible Hulk' for a third time? I don't get it.

Bryan Lee O'Malley