John Lasseter Quotes

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

You're not gonna write a hundred songs and have a hundred entirely different ideas. It's a matter of finding the ones that are the freshest and most unique.

The family sitcom has been around forever, since the advent of television. I don't need to reinvent it. But if you take something and you do it in a way that you haven't necessarily seen before, that's right where I live.

I love jotting down ideas for my blog, so I doodle or take notes on all kinds of stuff that inspires me: the people I meet, boutiques I visit, a florist that just gave me a great idea for an interior-design project, things like that.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

I've never done a sequel - so far, there have been too many new stories and characters calling my name.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

Brian Eno developed systems to keep himself on edge and to keep himself in a position where he's generating ideas.

As a director, you try to find what is creative.

Every film has to be the next something else; originality isn't celebrated because you can't market it.

Some of the screen's best moments were realized because a director went against all reason, all logic. No matter how incredible a story seems, it can be made credible. If you feel an insane idea strongly enough, you've usually got something.

Everybody struggles to come up with stuff that no one has ever seen before. It's a fine line between trying to get creative and doing something that's new, fresh and different - yet, for me, something that's based in reality that would actually work in these situations. These are the keys to great fight scenes and action sequences.

When I go into making a movie, personally, I don't try to bring other pieces of movies with me.

I really like it when you can step outside of what's come before and find a surprise for the reader and find a surprise for yourself.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

It's not just about acting. I love film, I'm a director now, I love writing, I love producing, I love having a company that makes films and to be prolific and have a place to put all the ideas that are constantly bubbling up inside of me and that don't let me sleep at night.

A great idea is not enough.

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.

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

Disney was not a good animator, he didn't draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer.

When you are pushing yourself to not go back to the same well, you're gonna come up with something different, or you'll find songs that are different.

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

If I had done a sequel to 'Day of the Tentacle,' there probably wouldn't have been a 'Full Throttle.' If I did a 'Full Throttle' sequel, there wouldn't have been a 'Grim Fandango.' It's important to make new stuff up.

I think having a great idea is vastly overrated. I know it sounds kind of crazy and counterintuitive. I don't think it matters what the idea is, almost. You need great execution.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.