Judd Apatow Quotes

My professional life in Hollywood has been filled with joy and laughter.

I live in L.A., where every coffee shop is filled with scriptwriters, producers and directors.

I've got plenty of contacts in Hollywood.

You throw a rock in Hollywood and you're going to hit someone in the film industry.

I never wanted to be an actor. Because when you're an actor, you depend on other people to come to you with scripts. You can't create your own. Unless you are a Raj Kapoor, who was a producer-director.

I'm doing my best. I read in the paper that I'm an action director. They always say that, "Action director Walter Hill", if they bother writing about me at all. I think that's fine. I'm happy to do the work.

"Prison Break" has been a really great experience because of the writers. I think that in television, you can have great directors, really good actors, but if it's not on the page... I think a series lives and dies in writing.

The movie industry is full of crazy people who think that they are god.

You need to know that going in, and you also need to be able to write all the time. So when somebody looks at you across the table and says, "What do you think about a movie where Miley Cyrus switches souls with a basset hound?" You need to be able to sit there and figure out how to make that possibly shootable.

I'm not really a full-time director, I just like to direct the things that I write because I think I'm going to know it better than someone else.

It happens a lot, but I also think of it as not so much like being abandoned by a director 'cause they're worried about a technical aspect, but I think actually that's my job.

I'm probably, if I might, if I stray I might write, go into screenplay or do something in film. Something like that but I think I'm pretty much going to stick to what I'm good at.

I think people like Lena Dunham really opened up the door to what was possible, and they've inspired young women to go into filmmaking and writing and directing and acting in a way that maybe they didn't before, because now there is a path and there are jobs.

There's obviously something that feels very good about being with a new filmmaker who's very excited, but I also think there's something very comforting in a director who's been around a few times. Both have their pros and cons.

A lot of documentaries have been made very quickly, but I think they're like frogs in an ecosystem: They're harbingers. Film is always two or three years behind, because it takes so long to write a script, get financing, and get it made. It just takes a while. But I think it's coming. It has to.

Women are making strides in many areas and women have mentored and supported me along the way. I think that women are underrepresented behind the camera as directors.

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me.

I think Jesse [Zwick] is part of a new generation of director, because we'd be kidding ourselves if we did not acknowledge that there is this unsaid rule that the hero looks a certain way.

Even in our business, as is the world, we are in the age of specialisation. You see a lot of names of producers on a movie. If you have the idea, if you oversee the development, if you oversee the production, if you help package the movie, you sell the movie - you can be a producer. There's not a lot of us who do the whole gamut.

You look at people like Gena Rowlands, but she had [John] Cassavetes to write these amazing roles for her.

Some people come up to be directors by coming through the camera department and there's not a lot of women in the camera department. The ones that are have to kind of prove they're one of the boys, I think. I don't want to get into trouble with generalisations but I think it's a fair observation.

I still feel lucky whenever I hear a director say, "Action!" Because then I think, "Whoa, I'm really in the movies. This is a real thing happening." I've never not been enthralled by that. I still love it. I still love hearing it, and I feel really lucky all the time.

Behind the cameras, there's a different problem, which I think is not unconscious gender bias. It's probably categorized more as conscious gender bias. Because everybody's known the numbers for decades. Nobody's stunned to hear there are very few female directors, only 4 or 7 percent. Everybody knows, but it doesn't change anything. It doesn't make people say, "Wow! We should change that." Nothing happens. It's utterly stagnant.

I think people use temp music quite a bit, but the people who write the temp music don't ever really learn that their music was inspiring a movie.

I feel that the thing about film and particularly about TV, actually, is it's being created now. We're living in the best time so far because there are many more women writing and women directing, women producing, and people are finally catching on to the fact that women want to go and buy tickets to see female characters and more than one in a film. So I actually think it's a very fertile time to be a woman over 40.