Joe Dante

A lot of filmmakers from my generation were lucky enough to have their work more or less perpetuated by people who saw them originally on TV and on HBO and certainly on home video.

It's very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.

I grew up in New Jersey and my father was a golf pro, so I was groomed for sports, but I wasn't very good, so my interests lay elsewhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

I think 'Pan's Labyrinth' is genius.

I love 'Evil Dead 2!' Who doesn't love 'Evil Dead 2?'

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

I like working with kid actors because they surprise you constantly. I mean, all actors do - but kids particularly.

When I was growing up in the '60s I would have thought that westerns would last forever.

Editing is kind of a solitary job.

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.

Repetitiveness is one of the things that's most difficult to get away from in genre pictures, because people come specifically to see certain kinds of things but get disappointed if they're presented in the same way. So to try to find a new way to show old stuff is always the challenge.

I'm always looking for films, but the horror scripts that I get tend to be very repetitive and often not that interesting.

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.

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.

If you're doing a family movie, you don't want it to be stupid. Farting chihuahuas is not my idea of entertainment for kids or adults. So you try to make a movie that adults can see on one level, and kids can see on another.

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

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.

The dynamic is extremely similar to Gremlins and the hero is very similar, plus the small town atmosphere. It really is in a way the third Gremlins movie.

I don't think you can ever be ahead of your time with cynicism about that subject. No, I don't think it was ahead of its time. I think it was very much a product of its time.