Peter Billingsley Quotes

When you're remaking a classic, you don't want it to lose steam.

Every trick is an old one, but with a change of players, a change of dress, it comes out as new as before.

An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.

I prefer to remake flops. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a remake of a flop, and The Quiet American is a remake of a flop.

I'm inspired when I find out about something that I didn't know was a remake. An example is, of course, stuff like 'The Fly,' or 'The Thing,' or even 'The Blob.' For our generation, all those things, whether it was 'The Blob' or 'The Fly' or something else, we had no idea they were remakes.

I'm not into replicating old movies. But one should never say never. Tomorrow I may feel like making a part 2 of some of my movies.

Remakes have been done forever. People talk about 'Scarface' and don't even know it was a remake.

I don't remake any movie, whether old or of other language.

I am strictly against remaking a movie.

They made a fatal mistake in doing 'Psycho' again. Why do that? Why revisit something that stands for itself?

There's something about taking a classic movie that people love and doing another version of that, you're setting yourself up for a mistake.

I feel old films should not be remade.

Everything that's old is new, and everything that's new is old.

But, you know there's a lot of westerns - not that they were bad - it's just that they can be remade because they're great stories that aren't indelible in an audience's mind when it comes to both the cast and the story.

I'm not a big fan of remakes. I never wanted to do a remake.

It's 2009, things change. I'm a creature of habit, so in the beginning I wanted it to be as much like the original as possible, but that's not reality. And reality is, this is a new generation, and people want to see 'Witch Mountain' again.

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.

I like the Stooges. You know what movie I saw that I sort of discovered late was Jerry Lewis in 'The Nutty Professor'. I really liked that.

The idea of doing a production of 'Carousel' that doesn't feel like it's stuck in the 1950s really intrigues me.

'White Christmas' is one of my favorite movies, so I've always just had a love for that kind of golden era musical.

Nobody wants to make a bad 'Flight of the Navigator' remake. There's just no interest. We're going to do it if it's good.

These things have a life of there own and never existed when I was growing up certainly worrying when one would get made. It's kind of amazing how that one movie kept living through all these years.

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

I think one of the reasons 'Gremlins' lasts and some other films don't is because I don't think the movie has a whole lot of dated things - sure, the cars, my hair, and few things here and there that date the movie - but it takes place in a sort of everytown, in a sorta non-specific time, and that gives the movie a timeless quality.

You could go so wrong with a 'Planet of the Apes' reboot; you could make it melodramatic, you could make it campy, you could fall into so many traps with it.