American Movie Quotes

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

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

I look at American movies, the big muscles, and try to apply that to Chinese film-making.

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.

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

Like most people raised on American movies, I have poor access to my emotions, but can banter like a motherfucker.

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 like looking back at people's faces in the dark. I like noticing details that no one else sees. But I hate it in the old American movies when drivers don't watch the road.

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.

American movies show you how to fight and break armsand necks. I want to make the action in my movies like dancing.

I didn't go to Paris until I was a grown-up in 1965. And when I went to Paris, it was the Paris I knew only from American movies.

Hollywood is a symbol of global movies, it's not just American movies. It's become a platform and a melting pot; it's for all the talents and capital from all over the globe.

One thing I don't understand is that average American movie-goers cannot watch a movie for three hours, yet they'll watch a stupid, boring, horrific football game for four hours. Now, that is boredom at its most colossal.

It’s funny, I started by making fake American movies, The Transporter and stuff like that. I was shooting in France, but everything was in English. But then afterwards, I was looking at real French movies like the Jacques Audiard movies.

I chose the American ones, more or less the last five years of the silent era, because those are the ones that aged the best in the way they tell the story. One, it's about human beings with context. It's a very classical story with feelings, with laughter, melodrama and it really works, the good ones - Murnau's American movies, John Ford's Four Sons, King Vidor's The Crowd, or the (Josef) von Sternberg movies. You can watch it now and it still works. I mean they are really, really good pieces so this is where I tried to work.

Romanian movies are not made the same as American movies are, only because it's newer there. For instance, cigarettes, over there, are much more prominent, and Americans aren't used to that.

Big hooks have always been a part of American movie-making. So, to make a movie where you're just driving story through the characters without a high-concept is a challenge.

I grew up watching American movies. My favorite movies have always been American, since as long as I can remember. I always had this huge respect for American filmmakers and American actors.

When we came to America, the movies here needed a "new wave." European films looked totally different than American movies, which were these lush, glossy pictures with this elaborate production design.

I think that if you do an American movie it's important to earn some money, but in a stupid way, to be respected.

Before I moved into the mainstream of American movies, I wrote a script as an experiment. I wanted to get very far away from the clichés about the three-act play - structure, development.

If I would want to have a huge audience, I would make American movies, not French movies, because there is a limit of course with French language. If I prefer to shoot in my own language, it is to play with my language, to play in my Paris, and I have complete freedom in France. It's so amazing. If American directors could imagine how free I am, they would have asked for political asylum immediately.

I was sick and tired of being an English actor who did a lot of American movies because I was cheap and good.

So one of the most unique things on screen in American movies today is everyday behavior.

Not disown my past or upbringing, but I'd admired American actors, really American movie star - particularly the rebel heroes of the '50s.

What I liked about American movies when I was a kid was that they're sort of larger than life and I think I'm still suffering from that reaction.

For me, it was a lot of pressure to make another movie after 'Inglourious Basterds' because I didn't want to do something wrong. I wanted to have a beautiful project for another American movie.

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

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

Very often with an American movie, the end is very happy and you just feel good when you go out. When you go to a French movie, it's kind of like, "oh!", and you can't go out; you're stuck in your chair. It goes so deeply inside of the heart.

For every big American movie I've done where I was the supporting guy, I've gone back home to Canada to do supporting movies where I was the lead.

It's like everybody is obsessed with Hollywood movies worldwide. And even though everybody hates the Americans, they're still watching American movies.

We've grown up with American movies. Not to say that American movies - or movies that have been based in Watts, Compton, or Inglewood - are a 100% true depiction of that world. But also you have inner-city London, and the foundations are pretty much the same. Especially me, growing up in Southeast London, in Peckham.

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.

All my favorite movies are American movies since I was a kid.

ou know, if you want to see jackbooting Nazis in movies, you've got to watch American movies made at that time.

I did sit in cinemas as a kid looking at English and American movies thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if the characters were like real people?" And the worst thing is films are constantly advertising themselves, drawing attention to their style of things. But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic. But you don't want the audience thinking about the bloody film. You want them to think about what's going on, and believe in it. Be flies on the wall, you know?

I didn't want to be on screen not nailing an American accent. It's an insult to an American! There are plenty of great American actors who can already do an American accent, so me, coming in and stealing their roles, the one thing I have to perfect is the accent. So for years I practiced. And we're lucky because the whole world is raised on a library of American movies. I would pretend to be Jim Carrey, and, I say Robin Williams now because he's in my mind, but those actors really inspired us to be crazy and be theatrical.

When I make an American movie it's going to come out all over the world-it doesn't happen the same way for an Italian film or a French film.

Maybe every other American movie shouldn't be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence.

'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.

America always seemed to me this foreign land that I imagined I could escape to if I needed to get away - and I think that came both from the fact that I was born there and from watching so many American movies when I was a kid. I was brought up on American films.

Oh, don't let's ask for the moon. We've already got the stars.

Don't let's ask for the moon.We have the stars.

Ladies and gentlemen, my mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you!

A boy's best friend is his mother.

A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

Watching a movie a couple of weeks ago. An American movie. I can't remember the name, but it wasn't even a sad movie. It caught me off guard. I was on an airplane.

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.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.