I think I entered the market around the time when there was getting to be less snobbery about the difference between feature films and television. I think there's been a lot more receptivity on television to interesting adult stories that in the '60s and '70s would have been made into feature films. I have no problem jumping back and forth. If anything, I find it less restrictive working in television.

Joe Dante

Categorized in : Thinking Interesting Problem

Editing is where movies are made or broken. Many a film has been saved and many a film has been ruined in the editing room.

Joe Dante

broken editing rooms

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

Joe Dante

want people looks

I don't believe that you can judge the worth of a movie in the atmosphere in which it comes out the first time. There's just so many reasons why some pictures don't catch on.

Joe Dante

atmosphere judging believe

Movies get found in the editing room. The movie that you make is not always necessarily the movie that comes out of the editing room. The trick is to perfect the movie that you have and make it the best version of what you've shot, regardless of what the intent may have been.

Joe Dante

editing perfect may

Finding a writer who can write decent kids' dialog and finding kids that can act realistically and not 'cute' is an effort.

Joe Dante

writing cute kids

One of the things I've always tried to do is to inject myself as much as possible into the movie, so I feel like it's mine.

Joe Dante

mines feels

I've made a lot of movies with kids in them. I don't know why that is, but it's something I've noticed.

Joe Dante

made knows kids

Movies cost so much that studios really try to impose their personality over yours. A lot of times, you can get swallowed up in that and end up making movies that are indistinguishable from anybody else's. One of the things I've always tried to do is to inject myself as much as possible into the movie, so I feel like it's mine. But that also comes from what you choose to do and what you choose not to do. There are certain projects I could have said yes to, and I know exactly how they would have turned out: exactly the way they turned out when someone else did them.

Joe Dante

over-you personality trying

When the first movie to show the anger people have about the war is a grade Z zombie movie, that tells you all you need to know about how afraid of ruffling anyone's feathers people in the movie business are today.

Joe Dante

zombie war people

When you make a 3-D movie you actually have to plan the way the visuals look because there's a parallax issue, and there's an issue of editing, you can't edit very quickly in 3-D because the eye won't adjust fast enough for it.

Joe Dante

issues eye editing

I think Pans Labyrinth is genius.

Joe Dante

labyrinth genius thinking

When filmmakers are kept from making films, there's a lot of different reasons why. Sometimes you work on a film and cast it and do all the work and can be just a month away from shooting, and all of a sudden, the whole thing goes up in smoke. But I do think the advent of a digital revolution is going to provide people with opportunities to make films that they never would have had before. I think you can do some pretty credible stuff now with very, very little money. Which I think is great for young filmmakers.

Joe Dante

opportunity people thinking

I mean, movies are all geared to be basically under 25, and they're all tentpoles, explosions, excitement and all that - they take advantage of the big screen, which is great.

Joe Dante

excitement advantage mean

Avatar' is the greatest, most comprehensive collection of movie cliches ever assembled, but it's put together in a brand new way with a new technology, and tremendous imagination, making it a true epic and a kind of a milestone.

Joe Dante

technology epic imagination

What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I don't know how long that's going to last.

Joe Dante

understanding long people

I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

Joe Dante

mind character reality

My generation remembered going to the movies as an event. We would see these things, we would bring them home, and we would think about them for years because it would take a long time before they would go on television where you could re-experience the fun that you had when you watched them.

Joe Dante

home fun thinking

There's so little difference between television and features as far as you make the film. I mean, you have less money and it's a little quicker, but the concept is all on television.

Joe Dante

differences mean television

I go to a lot of independents and foreign films. I really try to keep up and see what there is to see. If you really love movies, it's the act of watching them that you really love. You can sit and watch a B-Western and have just as much fun watching that as you can a classic. That minute when the lights go down is the part where the magic happens, because you know this could be great. You're always kind of excited, like, "Here I am again in the church of movies, and Mass is starting.".

Joe Dante

magic love-you fun

So I've always been kind of an apocalyptic kind of kid, and looking back at the movies I've done, there's some kind of apocalypse in them. So that must be what scares me... besides Republicans.

Joe Dante

scare done kids