Dean Devlin Quotes

We are at a point in the video game industry that the industry is hollowed out. It is out of touch with the zeitgeist, creating sequels and formulaic games over and over again. The energy comes from the indies.

I think the movie business is in trouble. It's all movies that you've seen before. Everything's a remake; they want things that are familiar rather than things that surprise you.

I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.

The film industry is run by multinational media conglomerates and they have their perspective on what they need from their product. That's why we live in an era where you see reboots and sequels and remakes and prequels, all these old presents are re-wrapped and offered up as new gifts.

Spin-offs were never really my thing.

Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.

I just think TV is becoming more and more interesting in a way. Films are more and more derivative, you know, whether it's 'Transformers 2' or 'Shrek 5', or it's yet another iteration of another kind of clone of something else. It's a bit depressing in a way.

I often wonder why people remake movies. Is there just a lack of imagination out there that they can't come up with an original idea?

Similarities in the vampire genre are so rampant that there's really no such thing as an original idea - only an original take on an idea that's been done before.

I mean they're making remakes of my films and I'm not even dead yet! Why would you want to make a remake?

In the design process, there's a need to be culturally comprehensive.

The question is - did Richard Attenborough have a right to make 'Gandhi?' And did Danny Boyle have a right to make 'Slumdog Millionaire?' Quite honestly, if they didn't have the right to make these films, I had no right to make 'Elizabeth.'

All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.

This is the world we live in, isn't it? Tons of spin-offs; people reboot things very quickly. I was amazed how quickly they made a Wolverine movie, then, 'Let's do another origins Wolverine movie.'

In terms of representation, television is reflecting an era that has passed. It's the wrong time; it's the wrong period. In all sorts of television, it doesn't feel like the 21st century.

It occurred to me that by naming the film itself 'Dear White People,' I could tap into the burgeoning meme culture as well as make a meta-commentary about the controversies within the film.

I don't think that 'Vida' is just for Latinos. I don't think 'One Day at a Time''s just for Latinos.

Doing a remake is an open admission that, 'boss, I don't have anything of my own.'

I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society.

I was not grown up in the U.S., nor in Japan. In order to create a video game that people around the globe can enjoy and relate to, I can't draw things deeply rooted in the local culture that I'm not familiar with. That's why we are not doing games about football or samurai.

There are artists in Belgium who try to imitate American artists. But it's like, if you're Belgian pretending to be American, you won't be better than the American because you aren't American. You have to do your own stuff.

As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.

The mainstream consumed our culture.

The film studios learned to our dismay but to their pleasure that if they spent $200 million making a film they could make half a billion on it. So they were not interested anymore in quality films... They can't afford to be that risky at those prices. Consequently you're getting a lot of remakes, sequels, dopey comedies full of toilet jokes...

In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?