Quotes About American Movies

#1. I've been working with good directors - the Wachowski brothers, Spike Lee, Terry Gilliam, Mel Gibson ... I love American movies, but I love European movies, too, and I want to do both.

Monica Bellucci

#2. South Sea natives who have been exposed to American movies classify them into two types, 'kiss-kiss' and 'bang-bang.

Hortense Powdermaker

#3. My label is to play bad guys of Latin origin in American movies. I'm happy with that label. I prefer to play that than to play a city boy. The bad guy is always something very tempting for the audience.

Jordi Molla

#4. American movies show you how to fight and break armsand necks. I want to make the action in my movies like dancing.

Jackie Chan

#5. I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well.

Neil Jordan

#6. Like most people raised on American movies, I have poor access to my emotions, but can banter like a motherfucker.

Josh Bazell

#7. Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

Daniel Day-Lewis

#8. I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies ... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.

Orson Welles

#9. 'St. Elmo's Fire' is one of my favorite films. I like the storytelling of those teenage American films. You don't get that now. Teenage American movies are all about sick jokes, puking a lot, arse jokes.

James McAvoy

#10. I learned English at school, or at least that's how it started. Also, in Holland - as opposed to some other European countries - we don't dub anything, so as a kid growing up, always watching English and American movies in their original language really helped.

Michiel Huisman

#11. We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands.

Edward Jay Epstein

#12. It's a big problem for American movies that all their movies are produced to be global.

Timur Bekmambetov

#13. I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.

Ben Mendelsohn

#14. It's like everybody is obsessed with Hollywood movies worldwide. And even though everybody hates the Americans, they're still watching American movies.

Roland Emmerich

#15. For me, personally, I grew up watching American heroes and American movies and TV.

Sean Maguire

#16. I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.

James Gray

#17. The thing is there have been American movies that are similar to Solaris, like Alien had a lot of things that are similar, although it's also got the horror element.

Alex Winter

#18. It's funny, I started by making fake American movies, 'The Transporter' and stuff like that. I was shooting in France, but everything was in English. But then afterwards, I was looking at real French movies like the Jacques Audiard movies.

Louis Leterrier

#19. I grew up watching American movies. My favorite movies have always been American, since as long as I can remember. I always had this huge respect for American filmmakers and American actors.

Noomi Rapace

#20. Romanian movies are not made the same as American movies are, only because it's newer there. For instance, cigarettes, over there, are much more prominent, and Americans aren't used to that.

Kristen Bell

#21. What I liked about American movies when I was a kid was that they're sort of larger than life and I think I'm still suffering from that reaction.

Guy Ritchie

#22. Hollywood is a symbol of global movies, it's not just American movies. It's become a platform and a melting pot; it's for all the talents and capital from all over the globe.

Bruno Zheng Wu

#23. America always seemed to me this foreign land that I imagined I could escape to if I needed to get away - and I think that came both from the fact that I was born there and from watching so many American movies when I was a kid. I was brought up on American films.

Andrew Garfield

#24. It was always a dream as I was growing up. I would watch movies, mostly American movies, and be so engrossed in those stories, all I wanted to do was be there. I wanted to be part of that romance or that fantasy or be that warrior or that struggling soul who finally makes it good.

Gerard Butler

#25. So one of the most unique things on screen in American movies today is everyday behavior.

Alan Rudolph

#26. That's probably when I get the most angry at American movies, when they just so cynically manipulate the audience without even trying to give a good story.

Gene Siskel

#27. My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, 'They're all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.'

Marina Abramovic

#28. In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies.

Berenice Bejo

#29. Ou know, if you want to see jackbooting Nazis in movies, you've got to watch American movies made at that time.

Quentin Tarantino

#30. I was sick and tired of being an English actor who did a lot of American movies because I was cheap and good.

Daniel Craig

#31. I didn't go to Paris until I was a grown-up in 1965. And when I went to Paris, it was the Paris I knew only from American movies.

Woody Allen

#32. American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

Todd Gitlin

#33. When we came to America, the movies here needed a "new wave." European films looked totally different than American movies, which were these lush, glossy pictures with this elaborate production design.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#34. American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.

Tom Hooper

#35. All of my favourite actors are American and I grew up watching American movies. It's weird I used to do a New Jersey accent in every audition in America, because I liked it. It's completely bizarre and everybody would ask: 'Where are you from?' And I would say: 'Oh, I'm from London!'

Robert Pattinson

#36. Even some of us who make movies underestimate their influence abroad. American movies sell American culture. Foreigners want to see American movies. But that's also why so many foreign governments and groups object to them.

Irwin Winkler

#37. The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.

Billy Joel

#38. I like looking back at people's faces in the dark. I like noticing details that no one else sees. But I hate it in the old American movies when drivers don't watch the road.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

#39. I look at American movies, the big muscles, and try to apply that to Chinese film-making.

Ang Lee

#40. Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials
they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think
rather than letting you figure it out on your own.

Alan Arkin

#41. I think a lot of African-American kids don't have fathers to teach them how to dress, so you end up being taught by pictures in magazine and movies. You see cowboys, Indians, old Hollywood films, Cary Grant. It has an effect on you.

Andre Benjamin

#42. Even though I studied in New York and I know the American system, I come from France where I learned that with movies in France where the director is king. There's no such thing as a studio edit. It's the director's cut, period.

Louis Leterrier

#43. The corporate system dictates what gets made, and the movies are so bad because of the economic structure of Hollywood. The big business takeover of Hollywood is at fault rather than American storytellers - it's what keeps textured movies from getting made.

James Gray

#44. For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society.

Pauline Kael

#45. The risk for me has to do with the nudity aspects. I'm an American actress in mainstream movies, and I would like to always be able to do them. For some reason, nudity is perceived differently here than it is elsewhere, and I didn't want to lose any American audience that I was building.

Amanda Seyfried

#46. In the U.S., some extraordinary movies have been made on politics and social issues. We learned lots of things from American cinema. But in the last ten or fifteen years, this has changed drastically. Today, that kind of movie is much easier to make in Europe.

Costa-Gavras

#47. Movies that are subtitled don't usually do as well in American theatres.

David Benioff

#48. When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

Clint Eastwood

#49. For every big American movie I've done where I was the supporting guy, I've gone back home to Canada to do supporting movies where I was the lead.

Jay Baruchel

#50. I didn't watch a lot of American television growing up. I just liked to read a lot and watch movies - movies, movies, and more movies. My family used to make fun of me because I'd like every movie I saw.

Joss Whedon

#51. I still remember 1997 when I made the movie 'Storm Riders;' that moment, a lot of American producers want to hire me to make movies in the States.

Andrew Lau

#52. In Chinese culture, it wouldn't occur to kids to question or talk back to their parents. In American culture, kids in books, TV shows and movies constantly score points with their snappy back talk. Typically, it's the parents who need to be taught a life lesson - by their children.

Amy Chua

#53. I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.

Sherman Alexie

#54. I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.

Adam McKay

#55. You know, every country needs another country to mock, and Australians seem to be pretty good at impersonating American people. Maybe it's because all the movies and music and TV you see there is from America, so we just have the knack for it.

Callan McAuliffe

#56. If the American public is so into morality in movies, why don't they throw more of their disposable income at religious-themed entertainment? For every 'Passion of the Christ,' there's a 'Fireproof' that comes and goes with no notice.

John Ridley

#57. As a newcomer to America who learned to 'speak American' by watching movies, I firmly believe that to change the politics of immigration and citizenship, we must change culture - the way we portray undocumented people like me and our role in society.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#58. I get a lot of dark scripts now. I don't wanna be stuck doing movies like American Pie. For someone my age, once you get started doing them, it's hard to get out.

Agnes Bruckner

#59. The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

Ishmael Reed

#60. Saturday night at my house, I often trot out classic movies and force the urchins to watch them. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I think it's important to teach kids about American culture, and films are certainly a big part of it.

Bill O'Reilly

#61. I don't think people have been able to deal with the fact that African American filmmakers can make movies about life and relationships.

Tim Robbins

#62. I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early '60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them.

Stephen Rea

#63. Blue jeans have gone around the world. But that's a product. We market blue jeans better, just as we market film better. But you can't tell me that if America didn't exist, the culture of movies wouldn't exist. It's not a distinctly American art form.

David Simon

#64. Interesting Fact: During World War II Germans could spot American spies when they sat in this L Cross position. It became popular in the states after cowboys in Western movies used it, but had not caught on in Germany.

Vanessa Edwards

#65. The Victrola, the Movies, a lecture: such are the three American alternatives to Silence, Scandal and Squabble.
Or else, get drunk. America knows no other devices to enable its inhabitants to endure either their own company or that of their fellow-creatures.

Aleister Crowley

#66. When we talk about Oscars, it's almost as a symbol of excellence, and the American public and the worldwide public accept that symbol. So, a movie like 'The Artist' that costs $14 million, has to go out and compete with movies that cost $140 million. How does David deal with Goliath?

Harvey Weinstein

#67. I got to learn from the American audience. Hearing what it is they're not getting. These are audiences, 35 to 40, an older demographic that controls seven to 10 trillion dollars. And the producers and distributors have convinced themselves this group doesn't go to the movies.

Peter Riegert

#68. By the mid 1920s the typical American town was in full sexual bloom. The change came with erotic fashions, literature and movies, and an unsuspected sexual aid, the automobile.

John Leo

#69. The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values.

Jeanine Basinger

#70. It's a cliche, but Americans are puritanical. In their movies, they are scared of sex, but they overindulge in violence. I could have cut a G-rated version of 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' that would have pleased the American ratings board, but it would have been five minutes long.

Alfonso Cuaron

#71. American Pie' was a big movie for me. No one knew it at the time, but it allowed me to be offered such movies as 'Like Mike' and 'New York Minute' with the Olsen twins

Eugene Levy

#72. I've made it my mission to make movies starring African American actors and about the African American experience and put them in the mainstream. They're very universal stories I've told - every movie I've done.

Malcolm D. Lee

#73. In our weeks of talk, movies and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition. I believe she was teaching me an intimate form of The Way. In her words: Every day is a good day - because we are part of everything alive.

Gloria Steinem

#74. I stopped trying to figure out American juries around the same time Adam Sandler movies started raking in millions at the box office
people just don't act predictably.

Jodi Picoult

#75. I've always loved movies about con men. I think con men are as American as apple pie.

Bill Paxton

#76. Movies give me an opportunity to go places. I'm not only a Swede but an American, not just a man of my time, but I've been living 2,000 years ago-and not just in a new country, America, but in the Holy Land, too.

Max Von Sydow

#77. Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving.

Gertrude Stein

#78. Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.

Ben Hecht

#79. Movies are the biggest export in the world, the biggest American export. It influences people all over the world.

Brett Ratner

#80. Most Australians who've got an ear can do an American accent because we grow up listening to them on television and in movies.

Jacki Weaver

#81. I just think Australia tends to make very good movies, so if someone hands me an Australian or an American film script I would guess the Australian film would be more intriguing.

Barbara Hershey

#82. One of the most interesting things, at least for me, are the soundtracks for 'The Social Network' and 'Drive.' Basically, it's what I did in 'American Gigolo.' I could have done the music for those movies blindfolded. And one of them won an Oscar, and the other is this massive soundtrack.

Giorgio Moroder

#83. I was lucky that one of my first movies, 'One Million Years B.C.' was made in Europe by a British company. The Brits, and a lot of the rest of Europe, seemed to really love exotic women. The fact that I was American and exotic just made me more appealing to them.

Raquel Welch

#84. We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

Roger Ebert

#85. American actors who voice animated movies are so brilliant at it, because by the nature of American speak, it's full of energy and full of commitment. And as a British actor, we have to kind of learn that.

Helen Mirren

#86. I think every American kid grows up dreaming about being in the movies. That's completely normal for us. But I mostly wanted to be a writer, and I got taught the scriptwriting program.

David Labrava

#87. I am coming to the end of acting. I have a list: another stage production, maybe one or two more movies, one more season of American Horror Story ... and then that is it for me. Because I think that's enough. I want to go out with a bang ... or should I say, a scare?

Jessica Lange

#88. I think as an American society, when we're paying too many taxes or dealing with war, we don't want to see sad things at the movies.

Zoe Saldana

#89. I also have experience working with American producer Roger Corman who knows a lot of secrets in making movies look bigger than their budget.

Timur Bekmambetov

#90. We want to be seen as more than just martial artists, or bad stereotype token roles in American TV and movies.

Dat Phan

#91. We have to make movies where we do not think this is for the American market or this is for the Chinese market. We have to make a good movie that anyone would just want to sit down and watch because love, language, culture transcend everything.

Michelle Yeoh

#92. The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.

Ben Hecht

#93. Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the best American higher criticism.

Camille Paglia

#94. I was a strange, dark little dude. I fell in love with horror movies, at a very early age. Somehow, as a first grader, I was able to convince my parents to let me go see stuff like 'An American Werewolf in London' in theaters, so I was headed in that direction anyway.

James Roday

#95. I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular.

Alexander Payne

#96. There's nothing more American than movies.

Adam McKay

#97. I walked out on American Gangster: this evil piece of dreck. Defenders of this junk say that these movies give Black actors jobs. So did "Birth of a Nation."

Ishmael Reed

#98. It's very difficult to get any movies done about Black heroes - Haitian or American - in Hollywood. The argument in Hollywood is that there is no market for those movies, and that is not true.

Jimmy Jean-Louis

#99. Reagan's easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.

Michael Rogin

#100. I want to continue to make beautiful movies. The most important thing is to be a part of beautiful stories, that's all I want. So I don't care if it's a Hollywood movie or an independent movie or a Spanish or American movie. I care about telling stories.

Melanie Laurent