Nostalgic Filmmaking Quotes

'Muppets' was very much an exercise in anti-CG and the anti-effects world. It was very much in camera. We wanted to create a world where tangible puppets walked around and talked to each other. You could touch them. You could meet them.

There are things that I am nostalgic about from the 'good old days.' I loved motion control cameras, actually. I love the way they sound. I used to do a lot of miniature work, and it's still warranted, but it's done less often, largely for budgetary, schedule, and flexibility reasons.

The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.

The first movie I literally ever made in my life was about two guys playing Stratego with each other. I had all my friends dressing up like the military characters in the game. So 'Battleship' is really my second board game turned movie!

'Toy Story' really felt like just a bunch of guys working in their garage for fun. When it came out and people liked it, it was mind-blowing.

Everybody who worked in film misses holding pieces of film, holding it up to the light, and seeing exactly where something was image-wise.

Period recreation is very difficult unless you make a black-and-white movie.

You know what it is, the reason so many 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds are saying 'Drive' is their favorite movie is that 'Drive' is a 90-minute trip into what a lot of seventies filmmaking was. It encapsulates the best of a certain kind of style, and a style that a lot of people haven't seen before, with the music and the way it's edited.

I came out of film school and went after movies that I thought audiences wanted to see or that the studios wanted, as opposed to the movies that I wanted. Over the last 10 years, I've gravitated more and more toward the films that I grew up loving - classic Spielberg, Lucas, James Cameron and Ridley Scott movies.

There's another aspect about the Seventies. Blazing Saddles, as wonderful as it was, sort of hurt the Western. It made such fun of them, that you almost couldn't take them seriously from that point on. That's why only Westerns that had the stink of Watergate or Vietnam could be taken seriously. There were so few Westerns made since then, from the Eighties on, that the few directors who did were so pleased with themselves and so happy to have the opportunity that they got lost in visuals, they got lost in the vistas and the pretty scenery.

I think that I'm very old fashioned in terms of my film references and what appeals to me, in a way with camera moves and a depth of color to bring things to it.

It goes back to a style of moviemaking I remember seeing as a child, in movies like The Man With The Golden Arm, which I think was shot all on a sound stage.