American Movies Quotes

In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.

It was always a dream as I was growing up. I would watch movies, mostly American movies, and be so engrossed in those stories, all I wanted to do was be there. I wanted to be part of that romance or that fantasy or be that warrior or that struggling soul who finally makes it good.

I learned English from watching American movies and American series. And you'd watch the movie the first time and not understand anything. Then you'd watch it again, and you'd start understanding more and more, and that's how I learned English.

'St. Elmo's Fire' is one of my favorite films. I like the storytelling of those teenage American films. You don't get that now. Teenage American movies are all about sick jokes, puking a lot, arse jokes.

The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

There's certainly enough writers and directors and actors who secretly aspire to make movies and films that agree with the center-right perspective, and I would argue the majority perspective in America.

In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies.

I have a tendency to think that that stereotype of American movies and Hollywood movies doesn't exist. Of course you have the studios that have a very hard policy upon their artists, but then I haven't really been doing any real Hollywood movie yet.

I've been working with good directors - the Wachowski brothers, Spike Lee, Terry Gilliam, Mel Gibson... I love American movies, but I love European movies, too, and I want to do both.

Foreigners have a complex set of associations in their minds when they think of America - from Iraq to 9/11, certainly, but also from Coke to jeans. It is entirely possible for people around the world to love American products, American books, American movies, American music, and dislike the policies of the government of America.

When I was asked to come over to the States, I thought to myself, 'What the Americans are very good at doing is creating stories with strong movement and plots that carry the movie as it goes along.'

My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, 'They're all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.'

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is in the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

I loved the movie 'Heathers' and the TV show 'Twin Peaks.'

Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials -- they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think -- rather than letting you figure it out on your own.

America is the only country capable of producing national movies: its culture has become a global culture.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.

I always knew America was all about guns. You go to the movies as a kid, everybody's got a gun.

We're a country of many different cultures, and that's always what has made this country stand out. It almost feels like making diverse movies is the most American thing you can do.

Foreign revenues are tremendously important, but foreign audiences are dying for American movies, not for films they could make themselves.

I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.

I like European movies because it seems those audiences are a little more patient. Those movies are always slower, where over here, the studio system freaks out if something doesn't happen every five minutes or if anything is confusing.

I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well.