Robert Rodriguez Quotes

In a great horror movie, you've gotta have some character development and you've gotta set some of your people up and you've gotta have a little back story going. You've gotta take that time for exposition.

I'm not a fan of horror. I don't think a proper horror movie has been done since The Shining.

You have to write scenes and design scenes that are scary and horrific, but that are also watchable. I didn't want people to just feel like they got punched in the stomach.

When I'm on stage, and when I'm comfortable or uncomfortable, I have sort of a knee-jerk reaction to try to make people laugh. It's my version of a handshake to show that I want to make a connection and to show what I'm truly like. It's kind of my statement like, "This is what I'm really like. I'd like you to love me."

The balance when you're catching people up, and the craft of what we do as actors, is to try to make sure that the exposition sounds like thought and dialogue, and a plan or a problem or something that is motivationally induced, rather than just telling the audience information.

There's plenty of ways you can go and encourage people. And you should do that. But don't demonize what you do, I do, what other comics are doing, when you see people showing up and listening and responding because they've heard the messaging in the new kind of way.

People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people's minds to lazy minds.

There are only so many ways to get people to go see stand-up, that it really is about the product; it's not so much about the theme of the show.

People want the nation to transform in the same way they want their own lives to transform. If you're interested in transforming your life, you can't just transform some things. You can't try to fix some things, but sweep other things under the rug because it's too hard to face them. And the same is true for a nation.

Silence Of The Lambs is a fantastic film. It's a horror film, and it's an incredibly well-told film that is about point of view in such a unique way. The way that film is shot, the way the eyelines are so close, if not directly into camera, betrays an intimacy with the characters and the audience.

The most stressful and difficult part of steering a large movie is that you are taking on the responsibility of communicating with a very wide audience. You can't ever hide behind the notion of, 'Okay, they just don't get it,' or, 'Certain people just don't get it.' You have to be mindful of the size of your audience, and you have to communicate in a way that lets them in.

Try to achieve the impossible and direct your people to ways of achieving it.

Interviewing somebody is a lot different than being handed a stick in a 20,000-seat arena and trying to sell tickets. You're very green when you start. I'm still learning things to this day. I'm decent at interviews now, but man, getting people to buy tickets is the easiest thing in the world for me.

Fundamentally, the most important thing is to get the film made for me and to get as many people to see it as possible. And if I help that, then - I know I help that, let's put it that way. I do know that I help that. It is called show business.

Horror movies can really go one way or the other - they can go amazingly or they can go terribly - and it's generally an extreme, in one way or the other, so you have to be very careful.

There's no way to tweak your content in order to goose ratings. You do what you're good at and let people follow you.

Years ago when I started doing TV and making appearances in big arenas, the place would put security guys up there and I said, "Please don't do that. It's very distracting to see ten cops in front of the stage. Everybody's looking at the officers instead of me. I don't want that." I also found that people will dare to break a barricade. If they have a barricade, somebody will always try to jump over it. I've found that the more open I am, the better.

I'm still doing me. I try to come up with different concept for my shows, you gotta keep the people interested, but I'm still me.

I realized that if you're trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it's mostly from my own process, my own experience.

I don't think about the audience, I don't think about what makes them happy, because there's no way for me to know. To try to think of what makes for entertainment is a very Japanese thing. The people who think like this are old-fashioned. They think of the audience as a mass, but in fact every person in the audience is different. So entertainment for everyone doesn't exist

I find that usually when I watch something like horror film, I'm constantly thinking no, it's not going to happen.

There's nothing more vulnerable than just standing in front of a thousand people, or ten thousand people, and doing your best to entertain them, touch them in some way.

There's a tacit agreement between myself and the audience that I will entertain them when they buy their ticket, and I've been the one that has screwed that up. Once in while I indulge myself and try something else, and I keep my fingers crossed that it will come out good and there'll be enough people who will enjoy it, but that doesn't often happen.

At the end of the day, a "jump scare" scares the audience for the moment. Slow burn horror ideas scare people forever.

Yet ["One More Try" ] really seemed to connect with people, which is a wonderful thing and a marvelous coincidence.