Michael Arndt Quotes

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

I worked in the story department for years on 'Cars' and 'Toy Story 3.'

I'm not saying I'm a writer, but I've been in movies for a long time, and I think I could write a script for a movie.

I would love to continue working on animated films. Yeah, those are my ambitions. No doubt.

Actually, no, but I am close to the people who are working on Chicken Little, and I'm very close to the people over at Pixar. I mean, as far as stories are concerned, almost everything we have could be told that way.

Pixar's short films convinced Disney that if the company could produce memorable characters within five minutes, then the confidence was there in creating a feature film with those abilities in story and character development.

I started at Pixar the month 'Monsters Inc.' came out.

The time it would take me to write a screenplay it would take me the time to make two films. I would rather make the movies, and I'm a better moviemaker than I would be writer.

I loved movies, but I can't remember ever really wanting to be an actress, and I certainly didn't imagine ever being in a movie. I think I wanted to be a writer.

A great screenplay makes everybody step up to the bar and deliver.

I always wanted to be a film-maker when I was younger, not an actor. I was an eight-year-old who dreamed of being a writer on 'The Simpsons,' which was a weird dream to have. But I started taking acting classes as a way to learn how to direct actors and I sort of fell in love with it.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

Mr. Disney and his staff were constantly scouting for great stories to bring to life on film.

To direct a genuinely animated film, you're really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.

Every Pixar film, when we start developing the story, it takes about four years to make one of our films.

I love the idea of animation just because it removes the actor from the character, and you can be anything. I've been devouring 'Adventure Time' and 'Archer.' I'd love to get my hands dirty on either of those shows.

I don't actually sit down and write, but I just have a lot of different ideas about films and making movies.

Acting is a plum gig, and then animation is an even more plum gig.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

My job was to give 'The Secret Life of Pets' production team lots of options when it came to Duke. So that's what I always tried to do.

High-concept one-liners were huge when I got my start in the film industry.

I feel that one of the fields that I need to learn a lot is screenwriting. I used to write my own screenplays, but it's just that I remember that at that time, I was saying to myself, 'I wish one day I will meet a screenwriter that will help me because I feel that I need to learn.'

I actually think storyboards are great. I don't draw well enough to do them myself. I've only used storyboards a couple of times. We used two storyboards in 'Margaret': one for the bus accident and for the opera sequence at the end.

I learned a lot about filmmaking from my dad. Starting when I was a child, I would listen to my dad as an actor, writer, director and producer talking about films - you know what the treatment would be in the opening, in the middle, and in the ending.

I would love to make a kids' movie. But they are very hard to make.