Scott Rudin Quotes

Those critics awards come and go every year, but the finished movie is your work.

The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing, and put it into a story.

I think you have a responsibility to the people you're making movies with, and I take that very seriously. I don't want to let up and I don't want to let down.

Bruce Norris came in twice to audition for 'The Corrections' and subsequently spent many months negotiating every point in a four-year agreement to appear in the show.

I love stories about women, and I think stories about women are generally pretty underrepresented.

I got fired from a movie that ended up being called 'Windows,' which Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, directed. I got fired because he refused to cast Meryl Streep, who at the time was at Yale. I told him I thought he was an idiot, and he fired me.

I don't particularly have a wide social circle.

You read a script, you try and think through what is the best, most wide-ranging way of telling the story: who stylistically, character-logically, psychologically fits inside the world of what you're trying to do. A lot of it, when you're casting, is trying to get yourself in the head of a director.

I was once a fairly angry person.

'The Social Network' was probably one of the two or three things I've done in my life that I'm most proud of. I'm not going to engage in what about it was disappointing. There's nothing about it I was disappointed in.

If you're going to spend two or three years of your life working on something, you've got to be making the kind of movie that discusses and influences the culture and is engaged in the world you're living in.

That's my goal, to feel like I've done the best I could. When I've done that, anything else that happens is a bonus.

Classics stay alive because a great actor or a great director wants to do them.

Years ago when I was at Fox, I was the executive on 'Raising Arizona.'

It's always hard when you make a movie that's fundamentally about kids for adults. How do you make people aware of who the adult cast is without making them feel that the adults are the center of it? You don't want to make it misleading, but at the same time you want to make it appealing.

Success is extremely ephemeral and very hard to hold onto.

I know that movies are basically meant to be entertainment, but I'm not that interested in entertainment.

Anybody who understands how a movie gets made understands that a deep-pockets player is not going to make a movie that has anything defamatory in it without protections.

I do what I feel I know how to do and don't do things that I don't. I'm a product of my sensibility.

I loved doing casting because I love actors, and I am very conscious of what actors do. But I always wanted to be a producer.

If you have the ability and the wherewithal to create work that's basically in a discussion with the culture we're in, how could you not want to do that?