Todd Haynes Quotes

I believe in good films and bad films. Box-office business and all is my husband's section. Sometimes I really get surprised when good films don't do well... Sometimes you are really shocked when an average film does very well.

A successful film is a good film, and a non-successful film is a bad film. It's as simple as that.

Now a movie goes out to two, three thousand theaters and by Friday night at 10 o'clock they know if you are in or out. That desperate competition is, I think, horrendous. It's awful.

I don't think 'Cocktail' was a perfect critical success, but it touched a vein in our culture.

All my films have been criticised, but here I stand with six superhits and three 100-crore films!

People feel the worst film I made was 'Jack.' But to this day, when I get checks from old movies I've made, 'Jack' is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie, they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams.

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.

I've never had a movie that got great reviews. I've had movies that got different levels of good and bad reviews, but you can more or less count on plenty of bad reviews.

A strange thing happens when Spielberg discusses his own work. His degree of self-criticism seems a direct reflection of each film's box-office performance. You will not catch him complaining that the audience 'didn't get' a film; if it didn't do well, it generally didn't deserve to.

For a filmmaker, whether the film is liked, understood or appreciated counts as much as the moolah.

I don't think much about how my past films have performed at the box office.

What matters is whether the audience likes the film or not. Everything else is secondary.

I don't judge cinema on its box-office success.

In films, you will be judged by your last hit or, let's say, your last film.

The thing we call critics are not really reviewers, they are not really critics. They don't have the discipline to write what we would term as critique - it's really just reviewers. They have a common man kind of taste. If you watch them overall, they are not different from the box-office. That's my view.

I have been in a lot of movies, but none of them are critics' darlings, you might say.

People can criticise all day long, I think I've proven myself, I think I deliver. And I agree, box office does not mean a movie's good, but I feel like I'm making good movies and I'm delivering in box office.

The stakes are high on every film now because there's the opening weekend. The first week is extremely crucial; increasingly, films are being judged in terms of opening day, opening weekend, then first week. People are going berserk promoting their films.

I think the success of a film is very important to an actor. It depends on how many people go to watch your movies; the more the merrier. Nobody wants to do a film for five people. You work so hard that millions of people watch the movie; this is directly related to box office success.

A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics.

You never know what movie I will be in next, but let's just hope it's sells (for my sake at least)!

I'm the worst at picking what movies are going to do well. I have no idea. I'm really surprised if a movie I like does well.

I don't generally do movies that get good reviews.

I've had movies bomb with terrible reviews, I've had movies make a lot of money with terrible reviews, I've had movies get good reviews and make money. And I like it best when the movies do well and the reviewers like them.

I don't think the audience always listens to the critics. That's been proven time and time again.