Latest Greg Mottola Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Brian Eno records and music became a huge obsession of mine in college, in a way that a pop song can provide solace. I don't know if it's shallow or silly, but it meant so much to me.

  Greg Mottola

  Song, Silly, College

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  Song, Writing, Artist

• I was in college - Carnegie Mellon, which is one of the reasons Pittsburgh was appealing to me - and I personally feel that whole world of what we used to call "college radio" is a big part of what kept me sane through a period where I stopped dating, I felt like a freak, I felt like no girl would like me. You know, a very adolescent response to losing my hair. I turned to obsessing about The Replacements and The Smiths and R.E.M. and getting further into The Velvet Underground. People who, in my sheltered suburban life, I knew of, but didn't know fully.

  Greg Mottola

  Girl, College, People

• Even the mistakes and the pain that you've caused and enacted upon you. That is definitely what I'm trying to capture

  Greg Mottola

  Pain, Mistake, Trying

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  Loss, Thinking, People

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  Done, Glad, Limitation

• I was running the risk in Adventureland, even though we stayed close to the script, because I wanted it to be not a schematic movie. For better or worse, it's not a wish-fulfillment movie. It's got a kind of happy ending, but it's not like I forgot to put on the "Ten years later," and they've got four kids and a dog. Those guys are not together today. It always was leading up to the moment of "Oh, I have my first girlfriend." Credits.

  Greg Mottola

  Running, Dog, Girlfriend

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  Mother, Thinking, Quality

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  Believe, People, Believe In Me

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  Lonely, Feelings, Lovers

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  Growing Up, War, Men

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  Italian, Thinking, Youth

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  People, Decision, Different

• I was naïve when I was young, I was sheltered. I had illusions about who I was going to be, delusions, and a little bit of pretentiousness. And I thought, "I'll write the guy like that. It'll allow me to make fun of everyone else if I make fun of myself."

  Greg Mottola

  Fun, Writing, Guy

• 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.

  Greg Mottola

  Character, People, Flaws

• I don't see that many movies where people are depicting middle-class suburban life in a more textured way. My feelings about the suburbs are not so wonderful, so my movies tend to be a little melancholy.

  Greg Mottola

  People, Feelings, Wonderful

• I talked about the summer of 1985, when I worked at an amusement park on Long Island, the kind of place where someone would pull a knife on you if they wanted a better prize than you were giving them. You found a lot of used needles beside the cotton-candy cart at the end of the night. It was a pretty white-trash, scary place. It was one in a series of terrible jobs I've had, coming from not much money and having no particularly resourceful skills. And at one point one of my friends, a writer on the show, Jenny Konner, said, "You should write about that."

  Greg Mottola

  Summer, Writing, Night

• When I was a TV director working on Judd Apatow's show Undeclared. I was surrounded by so many young people. People like Seth Rogen, who was 9 years old or something. It was just a ridiculous amount of talented young people. I started to think I'd like to see a young-love movie, but not one done in that glossy, Hollywood, high-concept manner we've become accustomed to. One that was, for lack of a better way of putting it, a little more ambiguous, '70s-style, where everyone was flawed, middle-class characters.

  Greg Mottola

  Character, Thinking, People

• 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. But when it's done poorly, it feels like shooting fish in a barrel, just saying, "Ooh, scary suburbs."

  Greg Mottola

  Heart, Scary, Pet

• It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.

  Greg Mottola

  Writing, Youth, Intimidated

• One of the dangers of making a movie about young people is it's potentially trite.

  Greg Mottola

  People, Danger

  Source: www.avclub.com

• My first love will always be movies.

  Greg Mottola

  First Love, Firsts

  Source: collider.com

• I've been co-writing a TV thing with Bryan Cranston, which we are going to find out soon if it's moving forward or not which is for Amazon.

  Greg Mottola

  Moving, Writing, Amazon

  Source: collider.com

• [Keeping Up with the Joneses] is not one of those movies where people get shot and fall down and there's no reality of what would happen if you got shot and knocked over a motorcycle. It's meant to be a slight comedy in that sense.

  Greg Mottola

  Fall, Reality, People

  Source: collider.com

• I feel like I'm long overdue for a "one for me" movie, so I've got two low-budget indy personal things I'm working on.

  Greg Mottola

  Two, Long, Lows

  Source: collider.com