Greg Mottola
I have a little bit of a pet peeve about how the middle class is depicted in movies. I feel like they tend to be either depicted in a very sentimental way, where everybody has a heart of gold except for the villains you're supposed to hiss at, or there's a sort of indie-style version... When it's done well, it's brilliant, it's 'Blue Velvet.'Collection: Pet
I have alopecia. My hair fell out when I was in college and I didn't take it so well.
The joke is that no matter how much we think we can evolve, we'll never escape our limitations.
For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.
I think I am attracted to that time in life when your worldview is still forming in small ways.
I feel like I came from a generation where... We didn't have Vietnam. We didn't have World War II. Nothing cultural was thrust upon us to make men out of us, so you're kind of free to not grow up that way if you don't want to.
I have scripts that I've only shown to animals... and they passed on them.
Some scenes comes together really quickly, and some scenes are disasters that take forever. But it sort of works itself out over time.
I can't seem to escape comedy. Whenever I sit down and try to write something serious, it just doesn't work.
I worry that I would actually hurt my career doing something I didn't enjoy.
I kind of thought I would only work exclusively in the world of naturalistic comedy drama, but there is this side of me that also loves Hollywood, and I wanted to see what that felt like.
When I read a script, I always - the first question I ask myself is, 'Is there something that I could bring to it that maybe the next guy wouldn't?' Because I've read a lot of very good scripts and thought there are people who could do this better than I.
The truth is, good actors are always looking to do something different. They are dying to play slightly odder characters or work on movies that aren't straight down the middle.
I specialize in movies that people say are underrated, with the exception of 'Superbad.'
I have some pride in the things I've done, but I'm pretty hard on myself. Part of looking at my old work is to motivate me to try harder.
To me, it's important to try and make an emotional connection with the audience.
My own personal geek culture years were when I was much younger. I collected comic books up until a certain age. I wanted to be a comic book artist when I was younger.
I'm not someone who's gone to Comic Con as a devotee.
I'm the most awkward man alive.
I certainly did work at an amusement park. In 1985. Wow - I'm in denial about the year. I was in college, and I had no skills.
In indies, life is very dark and realistic, and in mainstream films, the edges are all rounded off and very sentimentalized.
Having grown up in a Catholic family, while I felt like I was never conscious of any blatant anti-Semitism, I was aware of a slightly insidious, us-versus-them mentality. A lot of my best friends and early girlfriends were Jewish, and I encountered what was more of a suburban small-mindedness, of people needing to defend their tribe.
I worked for seven years doing computer graphics to pay my way through graduate school - I have no romance with computer work. There's no amount of phony graphics and things making sound effects on the screen that can change that.
I have a long love of fantasy and science-fiction.
I'd like to think I have a strange affinity for the embarrassing. Not sure what that says about me. But I like the awkward, uncomfortable comedy.
I remember on my very first film, which Steven Soderberg executive-produced, he said, 'Try not to repeat yourself. Do things that scare you.' Even if it's a challenge, I want people to say that this guy tried this thing. Hopefully he learned from it.
It's like I'm thin skinned, I guess, but I thought I could never write about my youth for the longest time. It took getting to my forties before I could even look back on it.
The Holy Grail audience are young people and, at the end of the day, that's who gets courted.
When you're a young person, the solace one can get from popular music is something I just have tremendous nostalgia for, affection for. I still have it.
'Duel' is one of the greatest suspense films of all time.
'Sugarland Express' is a movie that I really loved and watched a lot.
My first-ever job in the movie business, I was an art student at Carnegie Mellon, and they were shooting the movie 'Gung Ho' in Pittsburgh, and I worked as an extra for a few days. Michael Keaton bumped into me in one scene, and it's in the movie. And I worshipped him.
I had always thought my fantasy career would be making indie films and doing my own thing. But then 'Superbad' came along, and it totally changed everything. It was so hilarious and smart and extreme; you could probably do a psychoanalysis term paper on the male sexual psyche going on there.
When I first saw 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High,' I thought: That's what my life is like. That's my day-to-day.
I don't like high concept movies very much, and the kind of scripts that I would occasionally get offered tended to be really high concept comedies or romantic comedies. I just don't like it. I like much more realistic movies with actual psychology and behavior in them.
The crazy thing about independent filmmaking is that you're so judged on your first film. It almost needs to be one of those groundbreaking 'I've-never-seen-that-before'-type movies.
I like writing, but it really can be a struggle for me.
Film school didn't prepare me for the fact that you have to manage so many different personalities at every stage, and I learned nothing about what to do when a movie was finished.
I don't really talk about this because it seems indulgent, but I lost my hair, I'm bald, I had alopecia in my teens. That was back in the late '80s, well before people shaved their heads. So it's probably one of the reasons why I have been obsessed with that age, because it's locked in time where I feel like I had this personal loss that so affected my vanity, and I don't really feel like I handled it well. I'm so much older now, so it's not a big deal, but when I think back at it, I can conjure up how I felt then.Collection: Loss
I am very interested in the small decisions people make that do set you on a different road in your life. As much as we have influence over what kind of person we're going to become, there are little tests along the way.Collection: People
Brian Eno records and music got me through. It made me feel like there were other people out there who had the same questions and fears and unhappiness. Particularly those kinds of artists who were writing songs about exactly those things.Collection: Song
The first person I met in the business was David Heyman, who was a producer on Daytrippers and who went on to produce the highly-unsuccessful Harry Potter series.Collection: Firsts
Superman and Batman go to a small claims court together. I knew they'd cast [Gal Gadot], I had seen pictures of her, I remembered seeing her doing parts in movies and I went and re-watched stuff with hers and then met with her.Collection: Together
I feel this way about a lot of movies, that the characters are idealized versions of people. For better or worse, I am as fascinated with human flaws as anything.Collection: Character
Jon Hamm was the first I thought of for the other role in [Keeping Up with the Joneses], I recently worked with him on Clear History, an HBO improv movie that we had done together.Collection: Hbo
I lived on Thompson Street in SoHo for 13 years and I watched it go from a little Italian neighborhood to the Mall Of America. Then the obvious fact that it's pre-Internet, pre-cell phone. Everyone I think thinks their youth is a more innocent time. I just don't know.Collection: Italian
I guess bittersweet is probably my favorite tone, as a lover of Woody Allen and Federico Fellini and the French New Wave. You know, old Hollywood, sad movies. I guess it's my picture of suburban life, a lot of it being very, very lonely. I wanted to have that infused into the feeling of it.Collection: Lonely
I think Stanley Tucci was having an affair with his mother. He had this odd quality that I haven't seen him ever get to do again in a movie that just made me think he's got some chops. He's got a strangeness to him, but he's also clearly been stuck in this role because of his looks and his type. He's been really pigeonholed, I felt.Collection: Mother
Believe me, there is a ton of stuff we shot on Superbad that was unusable, because people were just riffing and riffing. It's just part of the Judd Apatow method, and part of the technique is to also be able to rewrite the movie again in the editing room.Collection: Believe
I'm really glad to have made a movie that way on Superbad, because I learned a lot about what can be done and what the limitations are.Collection: Done